I am, as always, a sucker for peeking behind the curtain—in this case, one made by Atomic Fiction:

[Vimeo] [Via]

Having just admiringly linked to the great opening titles of True Detective, how can I not share this amazing skewering on Portlandia?

[YouTube]

Thanks, Amsterdam!

Now maybe we’ll be able to remove the sign below (a real thing!) from inside the baskets of GBikes. 🙂

[YouTube]

“Beyond virtual reality. Actual reality.” 🙂

[YouTube]

Come and see. 😉

Lighthearted, yes—but not an April Fool’s joke. Here’s a screenshot of my latest search. (🚗 🚗 🚗)

[YouTube] [Via Chris Perry]

Having just returned from the Nepal hackathon (more on that soon), I’m thinking hard about to help people form habits that drive positive social change. Thus it’s great to see Nir Eyal’s example-packed talk on exactly that subject. I think you’d find it well worth watching.

[YouTube]

Heh—check out this fun work from Corridor Digital:

[YouTube] [Via]

I’m eager to show the Micronaxx this marriage of educational experiments with boundary-pushing Web tech:

According to the team blog,

You can play with sound, rhythm, melody, and more. Chrome Music Lab is all built for the web, so you can start playing instantly, whether you’re on a tablet, phone, or laptop. Just like today’s Clara Rockmore doodle, the experiments are all built with the Web Audio API, a freely-accessible, open web standard that lets developers create and manipulate sound right in the browser. We’re also providing open-source code so that others can build new experiments based on what we’ve started.

[YouTube]

At Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in SF, the 1916 commemorative floats helped us educate our sons a bit about the Easter Rising of 1916. 100 years after the events, you can tour Dublin and learn more about the participants through this beautiful tour powered by Google & narrated by Colin Farrell.

At each location, visitors to the website can see how the area looks today in Google Street View, while also having the option to view photos of how it looked during the rising, with supplementary audio options also available at a number of different locations.

[Via]

The “fine” motor skills of a young child’s greasy fingers? Yes, that’s just what I want applied to the expensive, fragile phone on which I’m trying to retreat into my own reality. :-p

Still, kinda cool:

AdWeek writes,

The push is tied to the Swedish “Sportlov” recreational holiday, during which many families go skiing. With this in mind, McD’s created a ski-themed VR game, “Slope Stars,” for use with the oggles (though they work just as well with any mobile VR experience). The game can also be played in a less immersive fashion without them. 

[YouTube]

“WTF, Kevin?!” A Google robot gets salty:

[YouTube]

Morning becomes eclectic.

Check out the zither, theremin, singing glasses, and more used by Orkestra Obsolete to reimagine the 1983 classic.

[YouTube] [Via]

Wow, that Andy Serkis is phenomenal! 🙂 Having linked to so many VFX breakdowns over the years, I get a kick out of this silliness:

[YouTube]

“Is this for real?” asks my wife. Yes—or it’s an incredibly well-crafted troll.

“Other specs and features,” writes PetaPixel, “include a range of 100m, a rechargeable battery, a reload time of just 8 seconds, and a holographic reticule with a distance readout.”

Welcome to the future, hon.

[YouTube]

Yes—a thousand times yes.

The creators write,

Lets make this cute Rolling Lego BB-8 a reality by voting for it! This BB-8 Prototype offers a Rolling BB-8 that uses 100% Genuine Lego Parts including magnets and weights to keep BB-8’s Head on top while he rolls. He would come with attachable arms, and a base station that helps demonstrate his rolling ability.

[YouTube] [Via]

Dead-on. 🙂

[YouTube]

I want instead to make people take action.

In 1983, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy summarized his mission as follows: “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip’.”

Product management is often an art in creating impact without much formal authority. Back to it I go.

[Via]

I found Jim Carrey’s self-deprecating bit oddly touching & insightful, acknowledging the insanity and perhaps dignity of our pursuits. Trust me, it’s funny & worth the quick watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uevbPqes7Wo 


[YouTube] [Via Craig Ferguson]

Presto change-o, VR on the cheap!

[YouTube] [Via]

I have some exciting, crazy news: Next month I’m heading to Nepal! 

I’m aiming to learn from earthquake relief staff on the ground, assist in their work, and then work with a team of Googlers in a 54-hour hackathon to build technology that’ll help alleviate this and future crises.

This is a team effort, and I’d love to have you as part of the team. You can help in a couple of ways:

• I’ve just set up a GoFundMe page to collect donations to Effect.org, the organization arranging the trip. All funds go directly to their efforts (not to my travel expenses, etc.), and Google will match your contribution.
• This Thursday in SF, the team is hosting a happy hour fundraiser (6-9pm). It’s $10 for entry, $20 for 2 free drinks, and $50 for open bar.

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that I’ve long been searching for ways to make a more meaningful contribution to the world. Well, it’s time I put more skin in the game. I’m excited that this trip combines learning, hands-on helping, and building lasting solutions. I hope you can join me in whatever way feels right—even if that’s just in trying to open ourselves to the needs and perspectives of others.

Thanks!
J. 

[YouTube]

For years we’ve known that browsing friends’ highlight reels on Facebook makes people sad. The interesting corollary, however, is that Snapchat—by emulating in-person interactions—makes people happier, at least relatively speaking. My takeaways from a new University of Michigan study:

• Ephemeral = intimate, chill, satisfying.
• This produces more happiness than curated worlds (highlight reels) like Facebook & Instagram.
• It’s second only to face-to-face interactions (which feel similar—spontaneous, mundane).
• You pay more attention to what’s fleeting because you can’t see it again.
• Snapchat’s “less supportive” (and thus more genuine?) than other media (“OMG ur so hot!!”).

No wonder this thing fulfills our primate needs, getting them sending dozens or even hundreds of images per day. “That app is my life.”

Days Of Miracles & Wonder, Episode #932:

Fatherly writes,

The PowerUp FPV is a collaboration with Parrot, leaders in smartphone-connected devices and consumer drones, to deliver “the first ever paper airplane drone with a live streaming camera.” Setup is as simple as folding your plane and snapping on the lightweight, microchip-powered carbon fiber propeller, rudder, and camera and setting it free. 

[YouTube]

I’ve long appreciated & admired developer Anastasiy Safari’s efforts to help artists by improving Photoshop’s color-selecting & -mixing tools. The latest update of his MixColors panel is compatible with the latest Photoshop updates & promises a variety of enhancements:

• Color groups: the most simple and intuitive color group management with drag’n’drop support
• Sync colors and color groups with the Cloud: safe 256-bit encryption on the server side!
• Color mixing improved: next-gen color mixing formula for faster and more accurate results

Apropos of the Plants vs. Zombies talk I linked to & summarized the other day, the new iOS audio publishing app Anchor is worth downloading just to see how quickly they make the user successful. Check it out if this kind of thing is your bag. [Via Max Roytman]

Shame that it’s being torn down, but cool to see this supercut of some of the bridge’s innumerable cinematic moments:

The 6th Street Bridge was built in 1932 and is currently the longest bridge (3500 feet) in Los Angeles. On January 27, 2016 it closed down and will be demolished in the upcoming weeks. The concrete has become unstable and for safety’s sake it must be rebuilt. The 6th Street Bridge has been an iconic staple in Los Angeles motion picture history and has been used in hundreds of productions.

[Vimeo]

Thanks, Vermont Public Radio, for a really simple, visual explanation in just two minutes:

[YouTube] [Via]

Wired features a fun story on how the animators behind the original Star Wars brief but memorable “holochess” scene aboard the Millennium Falcon resurrected (most of) the original puppets to riff on the scene for The Force Awakens:

[Vimeo]

If you care about the ways ubiquitous photography, life logging, and sharing are changing our memories & relationships, I think you’d really enjoy the Black Mirror episode “The Entire History Of You,” available on YouTube (below) and Netflix. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw3GIR70HAY 


Beyond the story & subject, I’ll note that I love the entirely matter-of-fact way that technology is handled here. Despite its life-changing impact, it’s never fetishized by the characters, never held up in some ooh-aah light. It’s the opposite of everything I’ve hated about one-note movies like Gattaca & In Time. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and with constant exposure, any magic becomes unremarkable pretty fast. Its effects, however, are anything but.

[YouTube]

Got 3 min & hate vehicles staying non-blowed-up? Sure you do!

Got another 3 to keep it shiny & chrome? Sure you do!


Got even more time? Well, that’s on you, but if so, head on over here.

[Vimeo] [YouTube] [Via]

Test new experiences with your class & help improve VR storytelling by signing up here.

Wired writes,

Using cheap cardboard headsets, Android phones, and a teacher-operated tablet, Google Expeditions lets students experience 360-degree views of places like Machu Picchu, outer space, and caves in Slovakia. […] Google announced today that the Expeditions Program will be opening up beyond its current “sign up and wait for us to visit” status. Google will release a beta version of the Google Expeditions app for Android.

The team writes,

We’re looking to you to provide feedback about Expeditions while also spreading the word and teaching other educators about the product. If you’re selected, you will receive an email confirmation and instructions for how to download the app. We’re hoping you’ll help by providing feedback on what you like and on areas we need to improve!

Hmm—sounds interesting:

The Creative Residency offers you a year to work on your creative passion project without distractions. As a Resident, you’ll receive a full salary and health benefits along with access to tools and mentorship to guide you along the way.

In 2-4 pages, tell us what you have in mind, and how you would bring it to life during your year in residency… We’ll be accepting submissions through February 29.

[Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]

Check out something really cool from my teammates:

BuzzFeed writes,

The feature, called “Donation Cards,” works like normal YouTube pop-up cards, but instead of suggesting you subscribe to a particular channel, these cards prompt you to do something more high-minded. They offer viewers the option to donate to a charitable organizations in $5, $10, $20, or fill-in-the-blank increments. If your bank account is already linked to your YouTube account via YouTube Red, the process is simple and close to instantaneous.

Charities will receive 100% of the money donated to them, with YouTube covering any associated fees. They must be US-based with an IRS 501©3 validation to participate.

[YouTube]

Mark Danielewski:

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.

(as quoted by seemingly tortured animator Phil Tippett in the doc mentioned the other day) Meanwhile stress can be an advantage.

I’ve long been fond of quoting Cake’s The Distance with regard to my career & sometimes quixotic commitment to thankless missions.

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
And long ago somebody left with the cup
But he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns
And thinking of someone for whom he still burns

He’s going the distance…

This talk from MIT’s Michael Hawley sounds interesting. You’ll be able to watch it live & ask questions here, or listen by calling (855) 870-5454 & using meeting ID 1005302015.

This talk is more history than future—more about picture hacking from the last 150 years than the last 15 or the next 100. But if you’re at all interested in photography and its futures, I can guarantee you will find something fun, interesting and new from the past.

Bio: Michael Hawley is an educator, artist, and researcher active in many facets of digital media. His research career includes pioneering work at Bell Labs in Murray Hill (computer systems), IRCAM in Paris (computer music), Lucasfilm in San Rafael (digital cinema), nearly two decades at MIT in Cambridge (at the Media Lab and Lab for Computer Science). He directs the EG conference (http://egconf.com), has been active as founder/advisor to numerous startup companies, and as an amateur pianist, won the Van Cliburn competition in 2002. Pertinent to this talk, he also served on the Board of Directors of Eastman Kodak during their demise (!); and as a researcher with interests in photography, invented GPS photography and produced the world’s largest published book (5×7′, 150lbs, on BHUTAN).

So long, Ziggy, and thanks for all the tunes. Seems time for a loving homage:



[YouTube]

Days of miracles & wonder, man.

From the CNN story:

Google Cardboard looks like a set of big square goggles. Stick your iPhone inside and with the right app, you can see images in three-dimensional virtual reality.

Doctors at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami used the device to map out an operation they say they couldn’t have envisioned otherwise. […]

That’s where Google Cardboard proved advantageous over 3-D printing. The printer would have given Burke just her heart — but to access her heart surgically, he needed to be able to visualize it in context with her ribcage and other structures.

Fascinating.

[YouTube] [Via Larry Fine]

“Dopamine,” says Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky, “is not about pleasure; it’s about the anticipation of pleasure. It’s about the pursuit of happiness, rather than about happiness itself.”

From monkeys pressing buttons, to humans pulling slot machine levers, to careerism & belief in the afterlife, variable rewards & delayed gratification drive goal-directed behavior like mad. As Vincent Hanna would say, “All I am is what I’m going after.”

Spend five really interesting minutes with Professor Sapolsky, and if you’re interested in how to build addictive products based on these ideas, check out Nir Eyal’s Hooked.

[YouTube]

Following on yesterday’s post about lobster traps:

• Get rich or die vlogging: The sad economics of internet fame
• Having a Ton of Instagram Followers Can Make You Absolutely Miserable

The awkward part was that Ashley wasn’t there to celebrate with Buzzfeed. She was there to serve them. Not realizing that her handful of weekly waitressing shifts at Eveleigh paid most of her bills, a coworker from the video production site asked Ashley if her serving tray was “a bit.” It was not.

So, carry on, then. :-p

PS—Being on something of a bumout roll: Big IPO, Tiny Payout for Many Startup Workers.

OT, but too good not to share:

“O-pen pit bar-be-cue sauce!!”

[YouTube]

“Faceshift studio is a facial motion capture software solution which revolutionizes facial animation, making it possible at every desk,” says the company, recently acquired by Apple. I have no idea what they’ll put the people or technology towards, but given that Apple also owns PrimeSense, the folks who created the brains behind the Kinect motion-sensing system, it’s fun to speculate.

[YouTube]

Having loved everything from Tauntauns to the ED-209, I’ve long known Phil Tippett’s name, but until seeing this frank documentary, I knew little about the man himself. It’s an enlightening tour through both film history (from the cantina scene in Star Wars to the CGI revolution & beyond) and the story of a passionate, often suffering artist. Enjoy.

Bonus: Adam Savage visited with Phil about using photogrammetry & 3D printing in order to recreate the Millennium Falcon’s holochess board:

And—what the heck, it’s Christmas!—here’s Dennis Muren talking about how they created the Rancor monster. I remember Stu Maschwitz telling me about how the scene didn’t really work until the animators added a big chunk of spittle to the creature’s mouth. Its swinging really sold the animal’s scale.

[YouTube]

For real! Check out g.co/lightsaber to pair your phone with your computer, then use it as a controller:

https://youtu.be/LPd0w3pVQVI 


Here’s a dude playing it.

The 3D graphics you see were built with WebGL and the 3D renders pretty damn fast on your computer. The real-time communication between your phone and computer are thanks to WebRTC and WebSockets, and there’s no lag or latency that I could notice. No plug-ins needed. Yes, Google is showing off its web chops with this experience.

If you’re super into how Google did this, head over to its developer case study.

[YouTube]

My teammates make me proud: they’ve just launched donation cards on YouTube:

Here’s a peek at how it works:

https://youtu.be/tkHi0VRfjgU 


[YouTube]

Uhh… how’s this for putting words in someone’s mouth?

The researchers who created it explain,

Here textured 3D models are reconstructed for famous people using only 2D photos from the internet and are driven by a video of George W. Bush. This is a result from our paper “What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks” submitted to International Conference on Computer Vision 2015.

[YouTube] [Via]

Shipping container as cross-cultural wormhole? That’s the goal of this Kickstarter project:

Portals are a global public art initiative created by Shared_Studios.  They are shipping containers that are painted gold and set up with immersive human-scaled video-chat in cities all over the globe. People enter these Portals to collaborate or just have a conversation with someone across the world as if in the same room.

Ah, the wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind fine… 🙂

After five+ years of customer requests (during which time, I swear to God, the team really did want to make this tweak), you can now select one or more layers and/or groups in the Photoshop layers panel, then drag them to the tab of another doc, have it pop to the foreground, and then drop them in. Just make sure you’ve run the latest update to Photoshop CC. Thanks to Tai Luxon, Jeff Tranberry, and everyone else who made this happen.

Masterful compositing & dubbing; hilarious, incisive results. If you need a perfect example of fair use & remix culture, look no farther.

[YouTube]

Some of my CrossFit gym mates have been missing practice lately to help float & recover Project Loon aircraft. Despite working next to the historic Moffett Field hangars, I’ve never gotten to peek inside—until now. Check it out:

Now if only they’d get back to testing VTOL aircraft inside…

[YouTube]

Wow, props for boldness: This week’s Photoshop CC update introduces a giant new Start workspace, larger tabs (easier to touch), a flatter UI, and more. Check out this quick tour from Julieanne Kost:

I still maintain that few people will actually use toolbar customization until it becomes easily synced/shared (e.g. let me type in the name of a leading designer and apply her panel layout, toolbar, and presets to my copy of PS). It also seems odd that you apparently can’t create multiple visible toolbars as Illustrator has supported for many years. I know, though, that it can take a long time for a full product vision to reach fruition, so it’s possible that more changes are coming. I’m sure the team would welcome your feedback on what’s important.

[YouTube]

Kyle McDonald walked around Amsterdam with his laptop & a webcam, recording what a neural network can identify in realtime:

All processing is done on my 2013 MacBook Pro with the NVIDIA 750M and only 2GB of GPU memory. I’m walking around with my laptop open pointing it at things, hence the shaky footage and people staring at themselves.

I’m somehow reminded of how, when our kids were very small, they’d run around simply blurting out the names of anything they could identify (“Living room! TV room! Lion!”). To wit (’cause why not?):

[Vimeo] [YouTube] [Via]