Augmented Reality Takes Over New York’s Museum of Modern Art - PSFK

From psfk.com

"New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter was witness to a unique exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art last month. Organized by artists Mark Skwarek and Sander Veenhof, the exhibition made use of an augmented reality app called Layar to upload work that could only be seen via an iPhone.

While unsuspecting audience were appreciating the art galleries, Porter could see the Berlin Wall, a desert path and faces, all floating in air in front of him (video below)."

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Particle System generator/Kinect builds 3D geometry like real world Matrix: Illuminous by Eric Gradman

From original post:

egradman | November 23, 2010 |

I had so much fun demonstrating StandardGravity on Saturday, that I decided to build this piece on Sunday.

Remember that scene at the end of the matrix where glowing green symbols traced across an agent's body? Well, this is just like that, but in realtime. What you're looking at here is a particle system, where YOU are the source of the particles. Particles (seen on screen as dots) spring into being on the surface of your body. They then traverse the contours of your body until they reach an edge, at which point they're flung into space and disappear. All this is possible because the Kinect lets me reconstruct the 3d geometry of whatever it sees.

There are other forces at work on the particles in this universe. Upon being flung into space, particles are acted upon by a sort of shifting wind (actually a perlin noise field)

The coolest part of this demo though is that you can really see how the particle system is sensitive to the geometry of the objects within view. In my hand here, I'm holding a bowl . When I turn the inside of the bowl to either face towards or face away from the camera, you can see the tendency of the particles to stream down surfaces. That behavior is noticably different when you're looking at the convex or the concave side of the bowl.

Once again, I've written this system using the freencet python bindings. The graphics are done with Panda3D. The particle system is a python module written in C. I'm losing some framerate because I'm passing depth data via shared memory, but the new version of the libraries don't require these sorts of software gymnastics.

Love it if true!: Is Haruki Murakami Hollywood's new Philip K. Dick?

Is Haruki Murakami Hollywood's new Philip K. Dick?

Is Haruki Murakami Hollywood's new Philip K. Dick?We've been wondering for a long time which author could replace Philip K. Dick as Hollywood's idea spigot. But now a strong candidate has emerged: Haruki Murakami, the Japanese master of weirdness who's already spawned two movies.

If you're looking for a Dickian storyteller who's got the pedigree to spawn some thought-provokingly weird movies, you don't have to look much further than Murakami, whose novels often include mysterious conspiracies, fantastical plot devices and alternate universes. Just like in many Dick's best books, Murakami's stories never entirely make sense, but they haunt you all the more for that. In particular, books like Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase feel particularly Dickian in a literary way.

Two different movies based on Murakami's work are coming soon, although neither of them is overtly fantastical. Norwegian Wood, based on Murakami's novel about a love triangle in the 1960s, is a movie from director Tran Anh Hung, coming out in Japan soon — but there's no release date in the U.S. yet. Meanwhile, there's also a short film, The Second Bakery Attack, starring Kirsten Dunst and Brian Geraghty, based on this short story. In the case of "Bakery," it seems like there's a weird sort of curse that causes an insatiable hunger that leads to extreme, bakery-robbing behavior that changes people's lives. But as with many of Murakami's fantastical devices, the hunger curse is kept extremely vague. Here's a clip from the short film: