Blog posts tagged as 'links'

– “We took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish”

– Cat Tunnel Sofa

– Lightning at 7,207 FPS

– Sprouts

– 5,500 pixels illuminated by digital light

– The first CGI? From 1963

– “Knightmare: Television for the videogame generation”

– And finally, retro-interactive-olympics themed niceness from the guardian.

From Alex, the new XBox SmartGlass, the context-sensitive second screen app for iPhone / Windows Phone / Android.

‘… the brilliance of SmartGlass isn’t just that it’s capable, it’s that the experience always configures itself passively. “Entertainment is there for people to relax,” maintains Whitten. So SmartGlass isn’t filled with menus and app icons; instead, it just auto-propagates content to correlate with anything on the 360.’

James shared a link to dancer.js – a javascript API which provides real-time audio frequency data, allowing the browser to map it to any arbitrary visualisation. It’s pretty impressive (and unsurprisingly processor-intensive).

Joe shared some incredible photos taken from the International Space Station with a 10-15 minute exposure.

Finally, from Jack – a look at the WiiU Panorama View

Well, inevitably after I gave the others loads of stick for not getting the weekly links out on a Friday, I don’t manage it either. Humble pie for brekkie on Monday when I see them all next.

Anyway!

Here’s what was flying around the studio e-mail list this week.

Alex found this 121-megapixel satellite photo of Earth

Denise pointed us at these lovely British birds made of Lego.

Andy caused much excitement (and used many exclamation marks in his email) when he announced there was a new Katamari Damacy soundtrack…

A slo-mo jumping (portly) cat!

James pointed to the interesting, elegant UI details used in the new iteration of the (already-rather-good) Soundcloud.

Take a look at the video here of a flying robot that swoops to perch on a human’s hand like a falcon. It gets incredible around a minute and thirty seconds in…

Andy pointed out this very interesting development in home automation and ‘domotics’ from a startup called “Electric Imp” as reported on Gizmodo:

Electric Imp came out of hiding today, announcing a line of Imp cards that can be installed on any electronic device to put it online and even control it. The little cards appear almost identical to standard SD cards, but have WiFi antennae and embedded processors. You can install them to existing devices using some of the circuit boards Imp sells, and the company is in talks with OEMs to get them Imp slots pre-installed on a range of products. Once installed, they connect to the Internet and Imp’s cloud-based software controls, allowing them to both be controlled remotely and work in conjunction with other connected devices.

One to watch perhaps.

Matt Webb pointed out this interesting company, http://www.quadrigram.com/ who market themselves as a visual programming language for creating visualisations from complex streams of live data (for instance from sensor-laden nets of things…)

Andy pointed to http://chirp.io/ who’s stated aim from their website is to ‘teach the machines to sing’ but making links into music…

James shared http://littlebigdetails.com/ with the list, which does precisely what it says on the tin. Lots of very nice UI touches of the sort that lift a product or service to an extra level of consideration, commodity and delight.

And finally, as a nod to the biggest film of the year so far, and tribute to the recently-deceased illustrator/author, here’s how Maurice Sendak might have drawn the Avengers.

Have a great week!

Soon, we’ll get back to managing to publishing Friday links on Friday – but for now it’s Sunday night and I’ve got time to round up interesting things that flew around our studio mailing list this week.

First of all a bit of a meta-point… Often things will be sent to the list with the prefix ‘X-Watch’ where X is a preoccupation of the studio. James decided to run a script across his mail to see what the most popular ‘watches’ were…

• 12 Parallax
• 4 Product page
• 2 Music Video
• 2 Printer
• 1 Injection Moulding
• 1 Baby
• 1 Bridge
• 1 Things on dogs
• 1 Kickstarter
• 1 weird skeumorphotablet
• 1 Car software
• 1 incidental media

What that tells you about us I don’t know…

Anyway. Onwards.

Our friends at RIG have been working on making jeans a bit more spime-y with Hiut Denim.

Joe found these lovely animations forming a children’s guide to critical thinking.

We discovered this amazing photograph from the ISS via Gavin Starks on Twitter

Nick and Matt Webb both pointed out this kinect-hacked shopping trolley companion species. Nick suggested that we should forget our ongoing search for a studio dog, and get this as a pet.

I think I’ll keep looking for a suitable pooch for us…

CoffeePhysics from Andy, and a car interiors tumblr from Alex, via ex-BERGler Tom Armitage.

The recent rash of babies from BERG might explain why this made the list… “…the first ever wireless, biosensor baby pajama.” [sic] Don’t worry. We restrained ourselves from wiring up Kari’s newly-arrived little boy with some arduinos when he made his inaugural visit to the studio this week.

MW liked this illustration of a speech-jamming gun a lot:

The new Nike store thats opening in a shipping container near us looks like it has a lot of interactive elements, some of which will hopefully be the human staff, but y’know.

Alex found this collection of googly-eye-enhanced bits of the planet, but he also found what I think was my favourite thing I saw on the list this week – an absolutely wonderful bit of manga illustration by Yusuke Murata, that uses the physicality of paper and folding to amazing optical effect.

Lovely.

What have we been looking at this week?

Telecommunications services for the 1990s

Friend of BERG Tom Stuart is writing a book for O’Reilly: Understanding Computation

answering questions about computation and the fundamental mechanics of programming languages: how do they really work? what can they really do? what do the programs we write in them really mean?

Music video watch:

“lonely AI whose efforts to reach out to its creators ends in tragedy” by @johnpavlus.

Injection moulding watch:

Injection moulding of 72 screw caps in less than 3 secs

Mattel’s Apptivity iPad toys enhance ‘Fruit Ninja’, ‘Cut the Rope’, and ‘Angry Birds’ gameplay

Pneutu.be

Nine block pattern generator

Wrap Your Head Around These Gears

The Strongest Weapon In the World a.k.a. Weapons of Mass Happiness / 2006

Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer

Nike+ new sensor array using Bluetooth LE.

The Mu

Weekend in SF from robert mcintosh on Vimeo.

Related: CINESTAR-360 COMPLETE PACKAGE

And the quest for a studio dog continues, Maddie is our inspiration.

We started this week, as all weeks should be started. With a video of a creature, on YouTube. Not a kitten, but a corvid. A crow.

There’s something completely delightful about this. As I watched it slide down the roof I found myself thinking – ‘Ha! nice, but lucky’. As I watched the rest of the video, I thought it was less luck, and more that the crow was having fun.

There’s some discussion about it here. I thought this was interesting:

‘… when humans look at a crow doing something human-like, they have a very hard time not seeing themselves as the crow.”

It reminds me of Hello Little Fella, where people see human faces in — as Wikipedia puts it — ‘vague and random stimulus’. Turns out there’s a word for that, and it’s Pareidolia. There’s also a word for the loss of this ability, ‘Prosopagnosia’. It’s taking a huge amount of strength not to fall down a Wikipedia worm hole right now, but the links are there if you have more time. (Chuck Close, a painter of hyperrealistic portraits has prosopagnosia. Apperceptive prosopagnosia is particularly interesting.)

Anyway, to continue.

Alex shared a link to a beautiful 360 degree panorama from the Shard at dusk, and this periscope rifle. I hope the two are unrelated.

After some time out of the office, Matt Jones has been on a link-sharing roll this week. There’s an open source espresso machine (which came via Jennifer Magnolfi), and a piece entitled “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”, by BERG friend Jamais Cascio, discussing the problems of future technology prediction.

There was also this Sinclair advert from 1983, and a rather spectacular advert for a dishwasher — a question of which Matt asks: “Is this the best advert ever? Lady fighter pilots, jetpack robot transforming baby bjorn dishwashers and coffee…”

Nick sent us this link of a 3d printing machine that works with concrete. It’s beautiful to watch…

And Alex also shared this link of a record player that plays slices of wood…

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

And that’s all for now. Early links this week – so enjoy the rest of the day, and have a great weekend.

Apologies for the late Friday links post! I had a rather epic Friday the 13th. Apparently there are two more of them in 2012 which is a lot for one year. (Damn these leap years that start on a Sunday!) I think I’ll spend those other two in bed. Or better yet, a cave. Anyway, to the good stuff…

Matt Jones sent us a link to this blog entry about the portrayal of Mars as a communist utopia in Russian popular culture. It’s worth having a look for the images if nothing else.

Also via Jones came a link to the new BMW Art Car designed by Jeff Koons which Jones described as “well new aesthetic“:

Joe sent us a link to this BBC News story about Sesame Street teaming up with Microsoft and using the Kinect to create “two-way television”.

Nick sent a link to this video of dynamic face remapping which is both fascinating and quite creepy:

Face Substitution from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Simon sent us a link to PINOKY which looks like it might be fun to play with for all of about 15 minutes:

Finally, via our friend and former BERG colleague Tom Armitage we discovered Fingle, the iPad game based around the thrill of touching someone else’s fingers:

Fingle Gameplay Trailer from Game Oven Studios on Vimeo.

That’s it for this last week’s links! Enjoy your week!

A bumper crop of videos this week.

Denise pointed to this from Wired UK, 2D patterns assembling into 3D objects once exposed to light.

You’ve probably all seen this ISS timelapse by now. But I can’t stop watching it.

Chairman Bruce‘s Venn diagram on product invention merits study.

In the ‘things you can spend money on dept.’ Matt W pointed to this New Aesthetic backpack, and Alex pointed out that our friend Brendan Dawes has got his new Beep store up and running which is awesome.

From our ‘robot-readable world dept’, Kari shared this advert she saw for a children’s toy video camera with face tracking A.R. capabilities

In the ‘giant nutty land-art dept’ Andy shared this sculpture in Germany

Alex shared this ‘superhydrophobic’ nanotech

Reminds me of ‘The Man in The White Suit’…

Robofold! Robot-Readable-haircuts for footballers!! Rhianna vomiting ribbons!!!

Finally, Kari won ‘subject line of the week’ prize with her email to the list entitled ‘Big Brass Nuts’… Which turned out to be this marvellous film about hand-casting a short run of beautiful metal things rather than a meditation on Schulze’s sales techniques…

Have a great weekend!

Hello! It’s Friday, we’ve just done our usual Friday demos. I’m sitting at my desk with a can of polish lager and Matt Jones is playing Huey Lewis and the News. It’s probably time for a roundup of the things floating around the studio mailing list on week 334.

Nick sent around this link of an old experiment looking into male / female walking patterns.

We liked this site advertising a workspace in NYC. Simple but very nice.

Nick also sent around this research project from Microsoft, working on scaling up 8-bit pixel art for modern displays. I don’t think Denise agreed with it.

Denise sent around lumibots – “small, autonomous robots that react to light”.

Jones sent around a nice post on Chevrolet speedometer design over the ages (I’m a sucker for anything design – car related):

And then Andy sent around this picture of the dashboard of a Citroen CX dashboard, with cylinders that rotate to display dashboard info. I’m a massive fan of Citroen’s design from this era. Brilliant. Look at the steering wheel!

Finally, Matt Webb sent around some an email entitled ‘First words’, so I’ll end with the first words spoken on the telephone, from Bell to Watson in 1876:

“Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.”

I’ll leave you with a studio staple track as it’s been a slightly music themed weeknotes. I think we have BERG alumni Matt Brown to thank originally for introducing us to this. Have a good weekend.

The BERG studio list has been a bit quiet this week. I don’t know if it’s that everyone has been so buried in their work that they haven’t had much time to follow interesting links, or if it’s just been a quiet week out on the internets in general. A few noteworthy things have come floating past, though.

Via Matt Jones we discovered a simple but ingenious tool for any amateur tree climber: First Branch, “for when you want to climb a tree, but the first branch is just out of reach.”

Alex alerted us to Fast Company’s article about the NewProductWorks Collection where you can find “every product in food, beverage, household, health & beauty care, baby care, pet products, etc” going back as far as the 1960s. Of course “you” would need to be in a particularly qualified position because it is not, unfortunately, open to the public. I wonder if working for BERG would get me in. I would so love to see that.

Matt Jones sent this video of the Recon Scout Throwbot, a throwable robotic reconnaissance agent for use by the military, which doesn’t just seem like something out of science fiction, it actually is. (Sort of. Minus the intelligence anyway. So far…)

Also via Jones came news of a new ultrasound accessory for your smartphone. I’m sure there are plenty of celebrities who will be relieved to know that they only need to shell out $8,000 for their own private, in-home ultrasound equipment rather than $100,000. More seriously, this could be a great advance for global healthcare.

And finally, Joe delighted us with a magnetic liquid hedgehog from Russia:

Which then sent me into a rabbit hole of Ferrofluid videos on YouTube. There’s some pretty awesome stuff out there.

Have a good weekend, everyone!