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Magic Lego Volumes Have Three Different Magic Shadows

Jesus Diaz — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:30:00 +0000

The uncanny Photosketch tool was not the only magic software tool debuting at Siggraph Asia 2009. This amorphous Lego volume can magically throw three different object shadows thanks to a program called Shadow Art. See it in action here.

According to developers Niloy J. Mitra and Mark Pauly, Shadow Art is a tool to create abstract sculptures that can cast three different shadows, depending on the angle they are oriented against the light source. These sculptures can be built in the physical world with any material, not only Lego, as well as used in 3D-rendering programs to achieve the same effect. [Shadow Art via bldgblog]

Pull-Nuvi System Gives Directions And Dumbo-Like Ears

Rosa Golijan — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:00:00 +0000

I used to be excited about iPhone turn-by-turn navigation, but the Pull-Navi system (straight from Tokyo University of Electro-Communications’ crazy folks) is way better. It comes with a stylish helmet and will yank on ears until they look like Dumbo’s.

For those that just can’t be bothered to glance at a map or screen in order to figure out where to walk, Pull-Navi is perfect because it takes advantage of reflex:

The ear navigator, called Pull-Navi, has six helmet-mounted motors to pull the wearer’s ears forward, backward, left, right, up and down. The designers say people follow its lead almost instinctively – pull left and they turn that way; pulling both ears forward or backward at the same time makes them speed up or slow down; and tugging up or down heads them up or down stairs.

Does this vaguely remind anyone else of how horses are guided? [Japan Times]

Image from KIDK

Scientists Work Out Way to Capture 3D Texture Info in a Flash

Kit Eaton — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:00:00 +0000

Some scientists at University of Manchester in the UK and Dolby Canada in Vancouver have worked out a way to capture 3D info of complex-textured objects really simply with a camera flash. You should care about this because it’s likely to make the textures applied to characters and objects in computer games way more realistic: normally texture capturing needs expensive devices like laser scanners. Instead this technique uses something a bit like high dynamic-range photography, with two photos taken of a real-life texture: one with flash, one without. After some nifty image processing later, working out where the light and shade come from on the object for each pixel in both the illuminated and unilluminated shots, and they reproduce 3D depth and colour info for the texture. It covers the whole field of the frame, and since it’s 3D it lets you change the angle of illumination and shadowing when the texture is re-rendered in 3D graphics. Though it’s still a work in progress, it’s pretty impressive, and apparently fooled a test group of viewers who couldn’t distinguish images made with the flash technique from laser-scanned imagery. It was demoed at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles recently. [New Scientist]

Oasis Table Starts & Ends Fishy Life With Sand

Gizmodo US Edition — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Here’s something that you might miss among all the crazy junk at SIGGRAPH. It’s an interactive aquatic life table called Oasis, by designer Yunsil Heo, that is completely covered by fancy black sand. Why is it covered, you ask? Well, that’s what makes it interactive. By moving the sand so it will show the LCD screen below you begin to grow aquatic life. At first only little guppies appear, but over time the guppies start to grow into fish and other crazy aquatic creatures. Make the sand-less hole bigger and it starts to populate with more life. Then once your little fishies are all grown up, just cover them up with sand and they’ll be dead. [Oasis]

Bouncing Star Glowing Smart Ball Ushers In the Tron Age of Sports

Gizmodo US Edition — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:08:49 +0000

Forget Beijing—the future of sports is appearing at Siggraph 2008 in LA. This softball-sized Bouncing Star rubber ball has a cluster of full-colour LEDS, an infrared transceiver and an accelerometer under its impact-friendly shell. By combining these components, the ball can create bright interactive games that you play by themselves, or with an interactive display. Here, the floor itself is a screen with the form of a court projected onto it, that responds to the ball’s movement.

The game in the video above requires each player to try to hit a projected target on the court with the Bouncing Star. As a player picks up the ball and begins to throw it on the court, the accelerometer in the ball acknowledges motion and transforms the ball’s colour. Using infrared, the ball can interact with the digital court; when the ball touches down or races by, the court can display a motion graphic or some other cool visual reaction.

Because of the low light in the video above, the intensity of the balls interaction with the display was not well documented, but the idea of a ball wirelessly interacting with a digital court is pure genius. If the same principals of this Bouncing Star could be integrated into all sports using balls we would have some amazing games to play and to watch. In Tron, the crazy frisbee game was just a program inside of a computer, but this Tron-like tech—designed by engineers at Japan’s University of Electro-Communications—could soon happen in real life. You hearing this, Nintendo? [Bouncing Star at Siggraph]

Fastest Graphics Card Alive ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Gets Official Tomorrow

Matt Buchanan — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:00:00 +0000

ATI’s Nvidia-slaying Radeon HD 4870 X2, previewed last month, will get official tomorrow at SIGGRAPH says the WSJ, who notes that some reviewers are calling it the most powerful card around. It’s an interesting test of ATI’s graphics card strategy: Cheaper, less power-hungry GPUs that can be easily strapped together (like the dual-GPU 4870 X2) versus Nvidia’s penchant for obscenely powerful single GPUs. The best part? Whoever you go with, you can’t really go wrong anymore. [

Smart Scene Carving Resizes Images Without Distortion

Charlie White — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:10:03 +0000

Take a look at this smart image resizing algorithm introduced at the SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group: Graphics) convention. Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Herzliya, Israel, aims to make images just as dynamically resizable as text is on a web page by using a technique he calls “scene carving.” We’re also thinking it would make a convenient Photoshop plug-in. We really can’t stand looking at stretched images, but this is a smart way to stretch or compress them. Bring it on! [Ariel Shamir, via YouTube]

Jazzmutant Multitouch Tablet PC Demoed

Jason Chen — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:20:33 +0000

Here’s a video of the multi-touch tablet PC prototype that Jazzmutant showed off last week at Siggraph. It’s got the pinch and spread features that Apple popularized on the iPhone, but this can actually take an unlimited number of contact points. You can use as many fingers (or styluses) as you were born with to move and spread stuff around. We could see this in a tablet, but replacing the traditional mouse and keyboard in a laptop is pretty unlikely. [Jazz Mutant]

DirectX 10.1 Leaving DirectX 10 Cards in the Dust?

Matt Buchanan — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:00:00 +0000

British site The Inquirer is reporting from Siggraph 2007 that the next version of DirectX, 10.1, requires spanking new hardware to support its sort of spanking new features.

The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard – such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently.

Consequently, your schmancy new DX10 card won’t be so schmancy when 10.1 drops. On the bright side, even if this turns out the way the Inquirer seems to think it will, since DX10.1 supposedly isn’t shipping until Vista SP 1 does, you probably have about 26 years of being on the cutting edge with a standard whose game support is nascent, to put it generously. [The Inquirer via /., Image via Flickr]

Detailed look at OLPC XO laptop

Seamus Byrne — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:33:52 +0000

At Siggraph right now, the One Laptop Per Child team is showing off the actual units, and this video gives a solid overview of where they are at right now. Apparently it is called the XO. You know, like the sauce. The demonstrator explains that the power system is now modular, so you can run off power if you have it, or a foot pedal system if you don’t (the crank is gone altogether). I love the fact this guy talks about it like you hear people talk up business computers “this mode is good for making annotations…” How many kids in undeveloped countries are thinking “great, this will help me annotate documents!” -Seamus Byrne