randform

A little excursion to the foundations of quantum mechanics:
Anton Zeilinger and collaborators paper “An experimental test of nonlocal realism” just came out in Nature, luckily there is also a publicly readable preprint version on the archive, the ORF reported about it here (link via Anton Zeilingers blog).

(more…)

A constant nuisance when vacuum cleaning are cables (see above image) since they easily get tangled up and catch dust. I always wondered, why there is no widely available system of e.g. adapters hooked directly to consumer electronics in order to avoid too much “cable spaghetti” – analogous to the solution of a computer blade.
People from IBM made this instructive video in order to display that blades could still include in principle a noble solution.

images of imaginary worlds (fotographed on a playground) – a followup post to Orbitall.
(more…)

(more…)

cool or cruel tool? “zwitterpartie” (crutchstilts) – randforms medgadget 2.0 of the day.

Berlin this morning in a wireless spot.

(more…)

Manicone is a new work by Tim and me (daytar). It is a sketch of a humanoid form in fourdimensional space. It is also a sketch in the sense that we kept the technical realization as simple as possible, i.e. with the application there comes (sofar) no Wii remote or wand, no 3D glasses, no virtual cave like environment etc. – just mouse pointer and sliders.

The modularity of the underlying software jreality however allows in principle for all these extensions (even if Open GL doesn’t have the same transparency capabilities as Tims software viewer). A real 3D immersion in e.g. a cave-like environment with a nice input device may lead to a more direct perceptional access however it is not necessarily allways needed.

An advantage of the simplicity of the application is that it allows for putting Manicone as a Java applet or webstart application on our website (which we will do soon).

Further technical extensions are then a question of the given architectural, technical etc. circumstances. Manicone is a sketch – in any aspect but the work it took to do it.

->10 min. video description of Manicone on youtube

Berlin Potsdamer Platz

If it comes to 3D in google earth most cities are still more or less little grey bricks. Berlin however has lately provided a quite detailed view of itself. The software based on the LandXplorer technology was developped by the Potsdam Company 3D Geo GmBH together with the Hasso-Plattner Institute. It was produced by Berlin Partner GmBH and works with the newest version of google earth together with a link to www.3d-stadtmodell-berlin.de.

via Berliner Zeitung

->A funny script for the Wii remote called Wiitar by Jordan Sanborn available at WiiLi.org (see also this old randform post)

->another sportive Wii remote application: Tennis with a Wiibot

if you dont have a wiimote but just a brain then this artistic communication with an industrial robot may be interesting:
->empathizer by robotlab

(more…)