randform

Here comes a little post in between – I haven’t yet found the time to upload the rest of the games convention images. However it is now – after the GC is over – clear that there are anyways no big news from the GC: Despite a record of 183 000 visitors the battle over new game consoles is postponed to the Tokyo game show. Probably even without feeling ridiculous Sony showed at the GC just a dummy PS3 under glas and trailers in wmv format. But also Nintendo didn’t show the wii console to the public (but only to showmasters) and found it funny to make riddles about the wii release date, which seems to be Oct. 2. Somehow I missed the joke probably.

Most interesting for us were the game controllers. Both consoles seem to have sensors for measuring rotation and acceleration. See e.g. STMicroelectronics and Analog Devices.(as an intro: wikipedia on MEMS). However the wii seem to need also infrared contact.

Whatsoever another 3D controller which might be even more interesting – especially if the specifications of the game controllers are not openly usable is the Novint Falcon (see image above from wikipedia) – announced on the E3 to be available for under 100$.

Meanwhile the math TU group/jReality group lost patience and bought this nice little gadget.

One of the first mathematical visualization clips if not the first is: the impossible map by Evelyn Lambart from 1947. In the film it is explained how to find coordinate maps for a sphere, partially exemplified with a grapefruit.

Evelyn Lambart is usually in the shadow of her frequent collaborator Norman McLaren, with whom she worked together in the fifties.

They both liked to play with graphical and likewise mathematical “entities”, like lines and shapes in the interplay with coulours:
Caprice en Couleurs (1949)
Around is Around (1951)
Horizontal Lines (1962)
Vertical Lines (1960)

But both have in their animations also more “lifelike” shapes, like birds and variation of birds, which are coloured but which are mostly “flat” reminding of “shadow figures” like e.g. in the animations of Charlotte Reiniger. This was partially due to their cut-out and scratching techniques. However also real life appears in their films. Evelyn Lambart did a lot of illustrative animations for other science films, but also for e.g. the film: A Chairy Tale, which reminds me of the earlier mentioned Georges Méliès. (Watch e.g. his film “Un homme de tete” from 1898, which is currently on youtube.com)

Remark: It seems that since two days there is Blinkity Blank by Norman McLaren on Youtube.com, and also parts of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger. I dont know how long the films will be there, and what copyright problems are involved with them, thats why I dont link them.

update 11.10.10: An approximate and by no means accurate visual demonstration of the proposition that the area of a sphere is four times the area of its circular shadow (look also at this comment)

Take half an orange:

Peel the half orange in a spiral. You peel the spiral in such a way that you go around twice in order to peel it fully, while keeping the width of the spiral arm (approx.) constant (that is you peel an archimedian or arithmetic speiral). By looking at the peeled orange one (more or less badly) sees that going around only once, one peeled off a part which covers roughly the area of the circular shadow:

Fold the spiral in the middle and put the two spiral halfs on top of each other:

One (again more or less badly) sees that the middle of the spiral is (approximately) at the point where the spiral had gone around once:

So roughly one half of the spiral covers the area of half of half of an orange (because the two folded halfs of the spiral cover half an orange). In the meantime such a half also covered the circular shadow (i.e. that what you see by looking onto the orange from above), i.e. the second half was more or less perpendicular to the viewer and was thus (almost) not visible.
This is of course no prove of the proposition but gives only a rough feeling, that the proposition could be true.

This is a classic. hoogerbrugge.com has been around for quite a while now. Still his catalog of flash nails, interactive videos, and stories is constantly growing (and his site got recently redesigned).
Definitely worth a visit is flow (an interactive music video) and the modern living/neurotica series. I must admit that I was kind of an addict in the years this series was a regular (1998-2001) — one of my favorites is “51 Nervous”.

Yesterday the New York Times as well as the Wall Street Journal published an article about a new motion capture device called “Contour” which was apparently shown at siggraph yesterday and which was developped by former Apple Computer engineer Steve Perlman.
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From July 19 to 21 the annual conference “New Media and Technologies of the IT Society” (“Neue Medien und Technologien der Informationsgesellschaft”) took place under the title “Film, Computer and TV”. (more…)

This is “old” news. There is an archeological site in Iran called “Burnt city” – a settlement which dates back to 2000-3000 BC. There a goblet of 8 by 10 cm was found on which a goat between two plants is depicted in various jumping positions. If one takes the positions together, it is clear that the movement of a goat was to be displayed.
The researchers put the images in a timely order…so one can see the 5000 years old animation in modern fashion.

The original post was I think from Irans’s Cultural Heritage news agency . However their link to the animation is broken (at the moment their whole site unfortunately doesn’t work properly) but I found another link here.

Inspired by chinese shadow plays and the works of Georges Méliès young …
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Yes we did it: Finally there is a public jReality release (BSD license). jReality is a 3d graphics library written in Java. It is developed at TU Berlin, University of Munich and Citty College New York at the moment. it has already been used in several of our daytar projects like seidesein, ADDeye, or vitruman.

There is going to be a short conference on Film, TV and Computer at the academy of sciences in Berlin from July 19-21. Website (in german) here.
It is free for students, 100 Euros for everybody else.

The conference is about the interaction between film and computer science and how the two areas merge into something new. There will be a conference gaming lounge and we will show there our installation “seidesein”.
The conference will also host a videoconference with the digitalcinemasociety

The argentinian artist Ana Maria Uribe (1944-2004) started out in the 1960’s with creating typoemas — static black-on-white visual compositions rendered using a standard typewriter (a Lettera 22 with a the Pica font). She was inspired by e.g. works of Morgenstern and the brazilian concretes (which I do not know). In the eighties she began to include animation into her poetry, which led to her anipoemas. She finally published some of her works also on the internet. I like these works on the net very much but I do not want to comment on them – they speak quite for themselves.

Her website is mirrored at the site of Jim Andrews (her original page has a lot of advertisements since it is hosted by tripod). Jim did also an overview page with more information on her.

Jim Andrews is an artist who also works with visual poetry, explore his site!. My definite favorite is the artistic game arteroids from 2003 – a shockwave game which is a poetic reinterpretation of the Atari arcade game asteroids from 1979.