Cameras
100 Remotely-Controlled Cameras All Gunning to Capture the Same Moment
Posted by Adam Frucci at 12:15 AM on September 5, 2008
At the Beijing Olympics, there were thousands of photographers all looking to get iconic shots of the games. For some events, that meant arriving many, many hours early and setting up elaborate remote camera setups. For the men's 100m dash, there were close to 100 remote cameras set up, all focused on the same thing: the finish line. Photographer Vincent Laforet was there, and he made this amazing video showing the sheer insanity of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment all working to capture one single moment, along with examples of some of the better results. [Vincent Laforet]

At the Beijing Olympics, there were thousands of photographers all looking to get iconic shots of the games. For some events, that meant arriving many, many hours early and setting up elaborate remote camera setups. For the men's 100m dash, there were close to 100 remote cameras set up, all focused on the same thing: the finish line. Photographer
It's no small secret that Lego holds a spot near and dear to many an editor here at Gizmodo, and if you somehow managed to combine those little blocks with Star Wars and the 2008 Summer Olympics (concluding today), well, you'd have our attention faster than it takes to pull the legs off a minifig. Flickr member
Track and Field athletes will probably roll their eyes at me for this one, but still I have to say I was amazed to see this little four-wheeled RC car scurrying across the field last night during the men's 5,000 metre race carrying javelins, and dammit, I wanted to write about it. After a little digging, I discovered a photographer who had documented the little cars (there are two at the Beijing games), and how they're a first for the Olympic summer games.
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Way back in April was when we first showed you details on Lenovo's
Scientists at Northwestern University have demonstrated a new nano-printing technology by printing the Beijing Olympics emblem 15,000 times, each logo so small the whole print run fits inside one square centimeter. 2,500 of the images, made 20,000 90-nanometer dots, would fit on a grain of rice. The polymer pen lithography uses an array of millions of tiny flexible polymer "pens" that can be used to make marks on various different nano-scales, and in this case deposit "ink" made of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid onto a gold substrate (what else would do, in Olympic season?) The team thinks that the technique, which can print out tiny dot-matrix imagery, will find uses in computational tools, medical diagnostics and the pharmaceutical industry. The study is published today in Science Express. [
One of the
That Nintendo Wii, what will it think up next? It's made us smarter and fitter and stronger and just so much better. Oh, and have you heard? Now it's creating OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALISTS. Japanese swimmer Kosuke Kitajima just took the gold in the 100-meter breaststroke, and instead of thanking God or his trainers in typical fashion, he gave another performance enhancer a shout-out: