"Tom Gauld is an illustrator, cartoonist, and publisher. His finished pieces range from animated advertisements to book illustrations, as well as the weekly comic strips he produces for the Guardian. Whether he’s drawing a campaign for one of the UK’s largest drug stores or illustrating a book of monsters, Tom’s drawing style is intimate and concise, reflective of an artistic process that uses technology without relying on it. As a publisher, he and Simone Lia run Cabanon Press. Tom has released his work through Cabanon with aptly titled collections like First, Second, and Three. The Rumpus harnessed the power of the internet to talk to Tom across the ocean about art, publishing, the balance between commissions and passion projects, and his upcoming book, Goliath, which will be out next year from Drawn and Quarterly...."
Popcorn.js, which few outside the web-development world have ever heard of, could be the next big thing in internet video. It’s a simple — for coders, at least — framework that allows filmmakers to supplement their movies with news feeds, Twitter posts, informational windows or even other videos, which show up picture-in-picture style. For example, if a subject in a film mentions a place, a link can pop up within the video or alongside it, directing the viewer to a Google Map of the location.
Popcorn-powered videos work in any HTML5-compatible browser and are easy to navigate for anyone who has ever used the internet. The tools the Popcorn coders are creating could lead to far more interactive online experiences, not just for movies and documentaries but for all videos. Want to make a cat video replete with recent updates from Fluffy’s Facebook page and all the latest tweets tagged #cats? There could soon be an app for that.
“Popcorn is the most developer-friendliest library for making it super-simple to make a read-only experience, which is what HTML5 video really is,” said Waldron, one of Popcorn.js’s lead developers, while ferociously typing out The Interrupters code. “The library is very small and very capable of making it super-easy to add an interactive level [to video]. If JavaScript is to the web what ActionScript is to Flash, I want Popcorn.js to be the new Flash ActionScript. There, I said it.”
It’s an ambitious goal, not unlike asking filmmakers to hunker down with coders they’ve never met to crank out new web concepts for film in 15 hours, which all six teams did. So there must be something to be said for the simplicity aspect of Popcorn that Waldron mentioned.
It’s easy to envision Popcorn helping filmmakers with their productions as well as creating communities for films after their release. At least one documentary project, One Millionth Tower, has already made use of the tools, coupling Popcorn with 3-D graphics generator WebGL to create a web-ready documentary that shows what would happen if the residents of a Toronto highrise were allowed to participate in re-creating their home tower.
Another film at the hack day, 18 Days in Egypt, created a site that pulled in Flickr photos, newsfeeds and other data from around the web (see the 18 Days prototype from the hack day). The revolution in Egypt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in February has died down, but if the filmmakers tool had been live as events were unfolding, it could have functioned as a massive media-collection tool (and can now be used to follow the events in Egypt as they continue to unfold).
Popcorn’s toolkit could also be used to build related mini-documentaries after filming has wrapped on a feature — or even long after the original film has left theaters. Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq, the creators and subjects of 30 Mosques, wanted their web experience to help people re-create and share in the trips they took to break the fast in a different mosque for each of the 30 days of Ramadan. Their first journey in 2009 was just around New York and captured on Tumblr; the second was a cross-country trip that they blogged; and the third journey was a transcontinental trek captured by their filmmaker friend Musa Syeed.
"Total Immersion, the global leader and pioneer in augmented reality (AR), today released a new version of D’Fusion® Studio, an evolution in AR technology. Free to download, D’Fusion Studio 3.2 empowers developers of all stripes to create a new breed of rich cross-platform games and applications that leverage Total Immersion’s groundbreaking AR technology.
Drawing on eleven years of market leadership, industry knowledge and expertise, D’Fusion Studio outperforms other AR solutions in three categories: the speed at which targets are recognized, the ability to track markerless targets as they move through an environment and stability, or lack of jitter, in the tracked image and associated 3D elements. D’Fusion Studio offers the most advanced feature set on the market-free of charge:
- Multiplatform: Developers can create games and applications for a variety of platforms including iOS and Android™, Web, Microsoft® Kinect™ and kiosk.
- Sophisticated: Superior markerless tracking—including face-tracking—quickly recognizes images as targets as they move through the scene and even rotate.
- Efficient: D’Fusion Studio draws from a single authoring environment and a single set of assets (images, 3D models, scripts) to maximize efficiency.
- Comprehensive: D’Fusion Studio boasts the unique ability to recognize an image from a target data store of up to 1,000 images (competitive solutions do not exceed a target data store of 30) – while maintaining the same recognition time, requiring only a slight increase in resource utilization (CPU, RAM).
- Immersive: D’Fusion Studio’s AR technology successfully blurs the lines between the real world and the rich digital universe of 3D allowing end users to deeply engage in the real-time experience without distraction caused by the technology..."
"In a two-month summer course on high-performance computing, promising undergrads compete to create innovative applications. This summer's winner developed a touchscreen Braille writer that stands to revolutionize how the blind negotiate an unseen world by replacing devices costing up to 10 times more.
ANDREW MYERS | OCT. 7, 2011 | STANFORD ENGINEERING
Each summer, under the red-tiled roofs and sandstone of Stanford, the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) invites a select group of undergraduates from across the country gather for a two-month immersion into the wonders of advanced computing.
Some of the undergraduates are gathered into teams. Some work alone. All are assigned mentors and tasked with a challenge. They compete, American Idol-style, for top honors at the end of the summer.
The competition is made possible in part by a collaboration between the U.S. Army and several university and industry partners that makes up the AHPCRC.
Adam Duran is one such undergraduate, a student both lucky and good. He is now in his senior year at New Mexico State University. Last June, he came to Stanford at the suggestion of one of his professors. His mentors were Adrian Lew, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Sohan Dharmaraja, a doctoral candidate at Stanford studying computational mathematics.
"Originally, our assignment was to create a character-recognition application that would use the camera on a mobile device – a phone or tablet – to transform pages of Braille into readable text," said Duran. "It was a cool challenge, but not exactly where we ended up...."
The brainchild of social innovation lab Good for Nothing, in collaboration with Made by Many, the platform 50/50 was conceived over a few Skype calls, a couple of beers, and some agile technical experimentation.
As a team we felt compelled to help, to try and make a dent in the huge funding gap. We thought about the direct power of citizens, people using their networks to come together and fix things.
It's now an international initiative with nearly 50 projects spread across 8 different countries. Think of it as a collaborative fundraising experiment—a collection of extraordinary digital projects from all over the world.
So far the success of 50/50 has been entirely dependent on a broad team of individuals, collectives, agencies, clients and media getting involved to form an adhocracy of makers.
We now need your help. We now have our projects. We need more donations.
This is how you can help:
find a project to back, and promote it among your friends and networks
if you like what we're doing, simply donate.
Posted on October 18th, 2011 | 7:00 am | Categories: Gary Hayes
The alarm rings. Get out of bed, have a shower, dress, breakfast, grab your briefcase, and bus ticket and out the door. Now start RUNNING! Zombies are chasing you. Or is it pirates? Or the Mafia? Games and stories have grown legs and Facebook MafiaWars and Playstation console games have jumped into the physical world. Welcome to the most exciting and entertaining commute of your life.
For the first time in technological history portable devices that are able to send and receive game/video media, are now location aware. This means big changes in where we experience our stories. They will be always on. Around the next corner. We will be living inside the story world.
To get a glimpse of future services in the locative, pervasive space we simply need to look at the now and extrapolate.
As kids we all loved playground games: Hide and seek, capture the flag, cowboys and Indians captivated our imaginations and it was an important part of our social development. Today adults use technology to recreate those experiences for real using our own imaginary, place-based Holodecks. Fulfilling some of our adult needs in this space, The Go Game for example advertises itself as “the future of corporate play,” team-building, and self discovery.
Nick Cave’s Soundsuits are made out of stuffed animals, sock monkeys, beanie babies, twigs, and thousands and thousands of buttons. And yes, you can wear them.
The group of six-foot-tall figures currently on view at Mary Boone Gallery are one part Abominable Snowman and one part Mardi Gras Indian, while the seven additional figures covered in buttons and sequins and connected by a cape look like the most fantastic tuba section every assembled. These “Soundsuits,” by the artist Nick Cave, are elaborate wearable sculptures made out of random materials like sticks, stuffed animals, sequins, and sock monkeys.
“It’s the materials that provide that impulse for me,” Cave tells Co.Design. “I may pass a beanie baby for 10 years, and then just one day, whoa, I’m vibing with something.” Cave, who runs the fashion department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also has to take quantity into account. “I have to have a large volume of what I need to use.”
Who Are Today’s Curators? And Where The Hell Are The Rest Of Them?!!
In this Age Of SuperAbundance one of the things we need more than anything is trusted filters. How do we prioritize what to watch? How to discover new work? How do we escape our echo chambers to be reminded of how expansive our taste really is?
We need folks whom we trust to lead us to where we would not go on our own. Ideally, these people will do more than just lead us to good work; they will expand our mind, and widen our social circles. But where are they?
Historically speaking we have depended on our critics and arts institutions to work as our curators. One of the shortcomings of this relationship is that is geographically focused—and we really no longer are. Similarly, historic curators are historically plagued by having to offer consistency to their locally-based community; they need to stay employed and the locals have influence with the institution. It has been rare that curators are rewarded by experimentation or risk taking.
The local arthouse theater, where they still exist, and when they can afford to innovate or even maintain, generally must balance film education with mass audience taste. They have to listen to the large distributors, routinely do their bidding, in order to gain access—or even hoped for access—to the top revenue producing titles. They get penalized if they don’t maintain the full week run. If they can afford to drop the $150K needed to convert to digital projection, still can offer the wide variety that digital transmission promises without risking disrupting the fragile relationships with their top suppliers. The battle for survival makes a varied diet of cinematic variety almost impossible to maintain.
In this Interconnected Age, we can depend on a much wider range of tastemakers, influencers, and early adopters. Curating, when freed from a revenue-based judgement, can take risks and even shift focus from pure entertainment to education and discovery. The hopes of the rapid blossoming of a new curatorial class that I’ve carried in this interconnected age seem to outweigh the reality. I am surprised that as far down the social networking path as we are, the new curator clan has not yet truly emerged. Or have they and I just am too blindly focused on my own things to notice?