One Step Closer to Augmented Reality

So I'm a little obsessed with the idea of walking down a street, wearing something like buddy here, , and seeing the landscape impregnated with media thanks to the emerging field of Augmented Reality. As such I become frothingly excitable when I see something like what Adobe is doing in Times Square. My advice is to NOT click on the link in that picture - instead, check out the Video over at Gizmodo. It's relatively simple to imagine how it is set up, and the dudes in the video claim it's lame, but look at them frolic like kids at a Harry Potter book release.

And what's that you say? Nothing "Augmented" about this? Well, it's half way there - and it's out now, so stuff it!

Videogames as art... finally?

Looking around for interesting video for the Wii, I stumbled upon this game, Endless Ocean.



According to IGN

Endless Ocean challenges gamers to explore a vast underwater region, scuba-diving through locales and interacting with aquatic life. Players will also be able to snap photos.

By the looks of it, this is a game made to simply be pretty - but I think it is a mistake to confuse this as a slightly interactive version of those fish-tank screensavers we all used to have. I think this represents some fairly intelligent marketing and production efforts from Nintendo, because it fits into the category of games that I would play for, say, 10 minutes a day as a mental break from my other work. When I want to just kind of space out for a few, Gears Of War is definetly not the answer.

I think this is a strong indication that the game industry is approaching the Richard Serra defintion of art - that of art existing to be without function, having only aesthetic value. Certainly, it seems Endless Ocean removes much of the "doing" that videogames are usually centered around and replaces it with purely aesthetic form.

Kubrick runs amok in The Walled City

Okay, so... I don't know if you have heard of Machima - basically, it is the practice of filmmaking through the use of a game engine. A crude example would be

• record your player in Halo running around, gesturing, and nodding his head
• add some bad dialogue
• convert to movie clip
• distribute to 12-year olds

The interesting development now though is combining virtual filmmaking with virtual worlds. I don't have the requisite skills to communicate what a mind f**k that is... other than to refer to boggling quote from a pretty good recent Machima short -

"The pictures weren’t really capturing the right feel and [I] decided to see how it looked as a recording," she continues. "From there I moved to the bar in the city, which I remembered had the most beautiful lighting, and continued to film shots." Only then did the kernel of a story emerge. Midnight City, she says, "reminds me of a noir movie, so tried to create a character that would live in that place."

That seems like something that your average second-year film student would say. The difference here though is that the "place" she is talking about scouting and shooting in IS NOT REAL... it's a chunk of code running on a server somewhere. This person scouted virtual locations, presumably created by someone else - set up shop, and "shot" a visually arresting movie. No, it's not Shakespeare... but it's not bad, either.

Here is a shot from this person's short work -

Mr. William Gibson, commence your crowing, sir. The Walled City is close at hand.

Smokem ifya gottem

Wow. When did smoke effects become this real? The is the first time I've ever seen heavy, wet smoke look real ala CGI.

This is a great trailer for the next StarCraft game. Obviously it's written with the 12 year old boy in mind, but it looks almost as cool as Blade Runner, and it's 100 percent CG.

Check out the movie (I'll hopefully post a pic later or something)

New Visual: Digital Cinema, Fincheriffic

Okay, so years ago I saw Dancer In The Dark, and the story was pretty moving, but of course the quality... done with a bunch of Canon GL1s or something... well, Dogma95 was an interesting idea that pretty much accepted crappy cameras.

Fast FFWD to Fincher's latest, Zodiac. I remember walking out of the screening I saw and remarking to my girlfriend that everything that Fincher had been working towards finally came to fruition with Zodiac. I mean, the entire picture is pretty much frame-perfect. Holy Jeez, it even made me take another look at Panic Room, just to see what the master does when he stumbles a bit. Guess I needed to remind myself that David Fincher isn't some cinematic omni-driod.

And then... I'm reading American Cinematographer about the look they got... and IT'S ALL ON DIGITAL. UNCOMPRESSED 10 BIT. Holy hell. The revolution just quietly, finally happened. Forget about the paperless office... this is the emulsionless worflow. FINALLY!16534654!!

Dude... if you wanna make movies and the like.... go see Zodiac. Let it stew in the lizardy nether-regions of your visual cortex for a few months... then read this article.

New Visuals: Sparklines

Something that I stumbled upon while trying to stretch Google Spreadhseets to its graphical limit (I wanted to make a graph and had to find this clever repeating character trick) is a new approach to intra-spreadsheet graphics: Sparklines. I included a choice pictorial samples below.

New Visuals: Flickr Bot Eats Facebook

Why have people tag your face when a robot will hunt your likeness down? This dude wrote a robot that looks for people's faces on Flickr and then makes a book. The invasion has begun.

Check out the boing-boing permalink here.

New Visuals: James Fung

For a brief time, I had the good fortune to work with James Fung. Fortunately, Mr. Fung has found time to start The Glogger Community. He is a really, really interesting guy. Here's a little window into what he wants the world to see...it might be, literally, through his eyes.

Also, check out eyetap. It is not the most commercial site in the world, and it
seems scary at first, but remember, so was text messaging.

New Visuals: E-Book and PDA

Electronic Books are cool. They have the same reflective value as paper (they actually ARE paper and ink) and they don't need much power at all, because each image simply stays and doesn't need constant refreshing like a normal PC monitor.

Apparently, this new company has made the first e-ink tablet device.

New Visuals: Total Immersion

A French company is doing really interesting things with real-time viz (as opposed to pre-viz) so that you can look at effects live, in camera, and compose your shot according to effects that are rendered on the fly to look almost as gorgeous as what you would get with a huge effects budget and lots of post-production time. An exciting point to note is that the virtual objects that are placed in the camera's eye know how to interact with the real world.

It is very difficult to describe the potential of this approach without sounding nuts, so check it out and decide for yourself: