Tag Archives: video

Benjamin Gets a Face Lift


It looks good. It looks modern. The only problem I have with the design is that big freakin’ blue stripe down the middle.

Compared to the $5 unveiling in 2007, the video for the new $100 bill, it’s well produced. The music. The animation. The design of the bill, all says modern, says 21st Century. It’s down right patriotic. Honestly, when I see the difference between these videos (and the 2007 video is down right embarrassingly bad) and and the change in administrations, I think it’s intentional. The government runs poorly under conservatives, because they want to say the government does a bad job. Just like how health, safety, tax, and other regulatory enforcement goes down under these “law an order” administrations, because they don’t like the law, but don’t want to be put on the spot arguing for say, more arsenic in drinking water. But I digress.

The color is tasteful. While it’s bolder than the post-2003 $20, $50, $10, and $5, it’s still predominately green, and still looks American. I really like the color shifting liberty bell in the inkwell. While the microlenses in the blue stripe are interesting, that strip is just horrible. It looks like someone forgot to take a plastic wrapper off of it or something.

I would love to see every bill similarly redesigned. And while I understand, that printing new $2 bills is somewhat sporadic due to concerns of flooding the market with them, (Last printed September 2006.) I’d still love to see a new $2 bill and a new $1 bill. It irks me to no end that, that the last time I had a wallet containing American currency with a consistent look was 1999.

What would the other bills look like? Would the color of the portrait’s face, and low-vision numerals change? Would the background image and inkwell and liberty bell to somehow reflect on the person pictured? If so, what would they be? I want all these questions answered. Damnit, bitch. Give me my money! ;)

Winscape

Way back in 2002, and then later in 2004, Ryan Hoagland (old site) became both a brief old and new media sensation with both his Cityscape and Virtual Windows hacks.

Well he’s back, with Winscape, a motion corrected update of Virtual Windows. Using two plasma televisions hooked up to a mac mini, wiimote, and an IR necklace, static photos and video can be perspective corrected for the viewer with the necklace.

He says he’s planing on selling it as a kit for somewhere between $2.5k and $3k, which really isn’t that much when you consider that’s the cost of the hardware. (Alternately, the software is only $10.)

Video after the jump.

Previously.

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Fish Tank

Years ago, I had this idea for a virtual fish tank. It would have five LCD displays (possibly touch screen) and a 3D rendering of fish inside. Each face of the cube would display the corresponding camera angle. For years that idea sat in a notebook, because I had no idea how to actually do it, and was making it way harder than it had to be. (I really have no idea how to do anything more complex than a cube in OpenGL.)

Well, it turns out someone at the University of British Columbia had the same idea, and built pCubee, a perspective corrected display box.

At least it was hard to do.

Fuck the iPad. I want this.

Video after the jump.
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This One is On Us

First there were bootleg concert recordings, now there are bootleg concert videos. This One is on Us is a fan project to crowdsourced concert films from the last Nine Inch Nails tour. I never would have thought this was possible, but with the advent of small highdef video recorders, it was inevitable. I downloaded “The Gift,” and it’s good. It’s as good as any other concert video I’ve seen.

And it’s NIN. Yay.

Trailer after the jump.
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LED Tables


Alex Schlegel‘s Day Table uses a photoresistor located in one corner, and eight ShiftBars (for a total of 24 channels) connected to an Arduino to play back the sunlight that fell on the table during the course of the day.

Macetech built this table to demo their shiftbrite RGB LEDs and a Seeeduino. It’s a 9 x 9 grid, but since each LED has its own controller, the cost quickly climbs.


While not a table, Dave Clausen‘s LED Cylinder is a good resource for discussing how to wire up set of addressable RGB LEDs, along with some good resources to parts and the like.

Recently I’ve been thinking about a LED displays. Originally, I was thinking about a full 640 x 480 display, but after doing the math, that idea quickly shrank to a more manageable 32 x 24 display. While part of me thinks that having one of these tables would be interesting, I can’t help but think that in reality they’d just be ugly and too bright.

I started to think about LED displays because my “coffee table” (It’s actually more an end table.) has a glass top and holes cut out in the back for electrical cables to pass through. What I really want is a multitouch display like either of these two guys are building. However, a multitouch is still pretty hacky and more DIY than I want right now. I like the idea of owning one of these tables, I just don’t want to build it.

La Vitrine’s LED Wall

Lighting artists, the Moment Factory installed on the front wall of Montreal’s La Vitrine theater a full length interactive LED display. Made up of hellalot of RGB leds, the patterns react to people as they pass on the street.

Moment Factory designed the lighting effects for Nine inch Nails‘s (w00t) 2008 Lights in the Sky tour. There’s a video of them talking about the effects on the tour, and how they were controlled from the stage rather than pre-scripted like stage effects normally are, but a combination of flash and their website being in flux have foiled me. Still, if you like effects and/or NIN, find the video. It’s not that long.

Previously. Previously.

Another video after the jump.

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Recognizr

The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), using software from Polar Rose, has created a mobile application that uses facial recognition to perform social search. Users submit photos of their faces to the Recognizr website, along with what web links they want associated with them (e.g. blogs, Flickr, or YouTube). Then by downloading an app to their mobile phone, they can take a photo of a stranger, submit it to the website, and if that stranger is a Recognizr user, find out all about him/her.

This work reminds me of Bradley Rhodes‘s old wearable/AR emacs plugin, the Remembrance Agent. The idea behind that application was that, while wearing a PC-104 based Lizzy wearable computer, you’d type in names into emacs, and then bring up whatever notes you had about them. I don’t remember if it integrated with the Insidious Big Brother Database or not.