Hope everyone is having a great 4th, including all those folks for whom it isn’t a holiday. I spent a lot of years working for Zambelli Bros. every 4th doing fireworks displays at various places, which was very exciting. Something I never would have expected before doing the shows; even when you are lighting off the launch charges on the firing line, you can still hear it when a few thousand people all go “Ooohhh” and “Aaahhh” at the same time. In the interest of retaining what little hearing I have left I no longer do fireworks from ground zero, but enjoy watching the results of other peoples pyrotechnic expertise. I also like virtual fireworks, and thought I would share a nice one I picked up from the Free Flash Animations web site. If you are interested in creating your own, watch the Flash fireworks tutorial, one of a huge collection of animation, coding, and scripting tutorials put together by Adam Khoury. He covers HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Flash, PHP, and a lot of other really useful languages and server environments.
If you are a digital artist or are just looking for some tutorials, check out Layer Paint, a new site full of resources to help out. This site really did just launch, so they are just beginning to compile their gallery and get their tutorials going. I found a free brush set there that was perfect for a project I am working on as an example, and while the brush set format is for Photoshop, all my other graphics packages like Gimp or Paint Shop Pro use them as well. This is a 2D resource site put together by the great folks at 3D Total to expand their online artistic footprint. The terms of service include an entry to prohibit the use of add blockers on their sites, but even when you give them an exception you generally only find a single ad per page down at the bottom. Since it is always for a 2D or 3D graphic software package or plugin I have been drooling over anyways, I am not offended even though my wallet is at risk. If you are into building your own images, stop by and check out this new resource from the UK.
Abney Park lead singer Captain Robert put together this quick and dirty instruction video on how to give your TV a Steampunk look. They also just posted a new live video online, so I had to include it here. The DIY instructions will work just fine for many models of TVs, but some other models would need something more elaborate in the way of masking. I love the fact that it is such an easy TV mod, makes me think of other equally easy projects one might try.
Not really, this is actually a life sized Superman shaped RC plane, but doesn’t it look realistic flying over the waves? Now I am wondering what other flying superheroes we could make this way.Thanks to Charlie Anders over at IO9 for the heads up on this one.
This sounds a lot more like a commercial than I would normally share here, but the concept is unique; using a small spherical robot as a real time marker for your 3D Augmented Reality character to manifest on. This gives you flexibility and mobility not previously available to interact with your environment. While the usage they are targeting is within a game, the potential applications range far beyond that.
For instance, this could be used as a personal tour guide in a museum, slaved to a GPS, a museum map, and an extensive database of facts on each exhibit, along with speech recognition processing. It would be able to answer your every question about any exhibit in great detail. Or linked to the camera and a library of geometry and trigonometry functions, you could use nearby buildings and moving vehicles to learn various math functions with literally real world examples, and again query the system to get a full understanding of what you were learning, with your virtual tutor traveling your city or town with you.
OK, for the outdoor applications you might want to carry a pocketful of the round robots with you, to replace the ones crushed under city bus tires or swept into storm drains by sudden showers as you go along. But those bots are extremely simple, and after another 6 months of producing them ought to become quite cheep as well, making their use in such environments quite cost effective. Thanks to Tech Crunch for the heads up on this one.
The Darpa Robotics Challenge is all about building robots that can operate in a human environment robust enough to do useful work during emergencies, to aid and supplement first responders. Whether the emergency is man made or natural, the robots need to operate human devices, such as doors, stairs, tools and vehicles, as well as recognize and asses their environments for emergency context. If you have been waiting for your chance to shine as a robotics engineer, this might be your kind of challenge. Tracks A and B have already been selected, Track C for software control systems, and Track D for combined hardware and software, are both still open. The initial work should be developed and submitted with the GFE Simulator package, which is the robot simulation software from the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Even if you don’t think your skill set is quite up to entering a competition of this caliber, if you have any interest in developing your own robots you should download this free software suite and try out your hand at design and development. If you do enter, and you are selected to continue past the entry level, at the next stage you may be eligible for some funding to develop your design. Our next Evil Robot Overlord could be one you made yourself! Thanks to the folks at Popular Mechanics for the heads up on this one, and check out their article for lots more detail. And yes, I did just install Ubuntu 12.04 specifically so I could get the best build of GazeboSim installed and running.