The show is (of course) a glorious feast for the eyes (and for various lions, serpents, and parasitic wasps; “red in tooth & claw,” man), and the tech and processes that go into making it are just as amazing:

[YouTube]

Start your day in the coldly gorgeous seas of Iceland:

Far closer to my home, here’s footage I wish I shot that captures the collapse of Skyline Boulevard…

…and the flooding of Vasona Park:

[YouTube 1 & 2]

Combining swappable lenses with a choice of battery sizes, the Moment 2.0 case for iPhone 7 (currently Kickstarting) seems really thoughtfully designed (especially the two-stage, SLR-like shutter release button). I’m eager to try it out, but it seems compelling enough that I might sign on sight-unseen. [Via Josh Haftel]

The ever-custom Casey Neistat takes us on a 360º flight as he snowboards behind a huge bespoke drone:

Elsewhere, what the hell was I doing walking my bike through hundreds of yards of flooded underpass yesterday? Clearly I should’ve been surfing, pulled along my the invisible hand of the… what, exactly? I dunno, just watch:

[Vimeo]

“Yeah, but you know me,” I told my wife: “I’d be so entranced watching this stuff, I’d stare until the lava was oozing up my disintegrating leg.” Aaanyway…

The filmmakers write,

“Hawaii – The Pace of Formation” is a window into the creation of an island. The Kilauea Volcano’s continued flow of lava into the ocean is one of the few places in the world to provide a front row seat of an island’s formation. The Big Island is literally changing before your eyes. This vast island contains 8 out of 13 different climate zones in the world, each with unique ecosystems, making the Big Island one of the most ecologically diverse places in the world. To showcase its diversity, we wanted to slow things down and let its beauty speak for itself. Enjoy!

And here’s a peek behind the scenes:

[Vimeo 1 & 2]

Polar Steps is an app that promises to make interactive & printed travel journals by leveraging the data your phone captures. It looks very cool & I’ve turned it on, but sadly it seems unable to gather data from past trips.

Meanwhile Relive is a hosted service that can auto-generate movies like this from your Strava/Garmin data + photos:  

[YouTube]

If you’d asked, “Hey man, what looks to be a beautiful, modern city that’d lend itself to great overhead timelapse photography?,” I can’t say that “Minsk!” would’ve popped off my tongue. But that’s before Artem Pryadko stepped up :

[Vimeo] [Via]

I’m suddenly having technicolor flashbacks to getting hosed on Holi by Nepalese orphans….

There’s lots of good stuff in this crazy vid from The Slow-Mo guys as they detonate 25 airbags full of colorful powder, but things largely get rocking around the 4:00 and 7:00 marks.

[YouTube]

Wow: Graphic design student Matteo Archondis labored to create this 2-minute tour of the planet using only images he snagged from Earth:

PetaPixel writes,

In all, the hyperlapse contains some 3,300 screenshots captured over the course of 2 days, and edited together in a grueling post-processing workflow that took another week after that…

“Thanks to the developer tools of Google Chrome, I was able to remove all the items that interfered with the user experience,” explains Archondis. “I also removed the labels so that the final image could be as clean and realistic as possible, so that I could concentrate on the camera movements as if it was in real life.”

[YouTube]

Recently appointed UN Goodwill Ambassador Nikolaj Coster-Waldau recently donned a Trekker backpack & walked around Greenland (his second home) to share its beauty and raise awareness about climate change. Check out the interactive 360º results.

Wow—this paper (don’t worry, I’m not going to read it either) promises to recreate face data from extremely low-res images. As Yonatan Zunger explains,

[I]t takes a pixelated image, and uses the fact that it knows it’s looking at a human face, and what human faces look like, to turn each pixel into a 4×4 grid of its best guess of which colors would have to have been there to both be consistent with a face shape and with the average color it saw.

On the right are the original pictures, at 32×32 resolution. On the left is what happens after they’re reduced down to 8×8, the sort of thing you would get when a camera is at the limit of its resolution. In the middle is what their algorithm recovered.