randform

to the day one month ago the world’s first truly open source short movie made its online appearance. Since then a vivid discussion about “what is it all about” emerged (see e.g. here (german)). As for end of May they counted half a million downloads. The project was realized almost etirely by using open source software (most prominently blender for modeling) and sponsored and hosted by the Netherlands Media Art Institute. (complete credits here)

but popping ball lightning (or at least ball lightning like plasma clouds). These are generated by an underwater discharge of a lousy 60 Ampere (so not for pocket use). Experiment (and image) are from Max-Plack-Institute für Plasmaphysik (german). An englisch translation is available at physorg.com.

It is sometimes interesting to observe how ideas breed. Since some years there has been Ken Perlins vision of a Laser-Leia – or err – a teddybear? – on his marvelous and famous homepage (-> which had been included in the Whitney artport!). Seems last year (more…)

we get hyperselfreferential to improve our google ranking :).

I.e. this is a follow up to the two posts “Journées Informatique et Géométrie” 2006 and to 3 from 2 (dimensions of course).— Or to put it differently: I couldn’t resist to try out the software mentioned in 3 from 2 (dimensions of course). As a matter of fact the software works brilliantly on minimalistic math buildings. In particular it turned the image of the Nautibus building on the Campus in Lyon in to a Potyomkin– Nautibus. Next time I try Roermond-Ecke-Schönhauser
(“corner of Roermond and Schoenhauser Strasse”).

Unfortunately the jReality filereader (I have nothing to do with this bear!) has sofar no VRML2.0 parser, so I had to use Xj3D, whose navigation is mildly speaking “uncomfortable”. Stay tuned for the parser and in particular for the upcoming jReality release!

At Carnegie Mellon the group around Alexei Efros developed a technique to reconstruct 3d data from a single outdoor 2d image. With impressive results.
(via slashdot)

We finally managed to put an excerpt of our video documentation of seidesein on the daytar website.

seidesein is an interactive environment, which investigates communication in virtual 3D space.

seidesein can be experienced on a home computer as well as in bigger setups like a virtual reality theatre. This is due to the platform independency of the underlying software called jReality. (see also links above :-))

My little remix of the original video at youtube. :-)
The android is the work of electrical engineers at the University of Osaka.
From the article on national geographic news:

“Repliee Q1 appeared on June 9 at the 2005 World Expo in Japan, where she gestured, blinked, spoke, and even appeared to breathe. …the android is partially covered in skinlike silicone. Q1 is powered by a nearby air compressor, and has 31 points of articulation in its upper body.”

Whatsoever- one thing I learned from the video: real (android?) women wear pink jackets.

The xblocks 3D maze is a fairly straight und unloaded sculpture. I wonder how a video game could work e.g. on Rodins Burgers of Calais :-O:

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