This absolutely has to be my favorite video of a schoolteacher (specifically a German teacher) building a Tardis. This was obviously a true labor of love, appropriate for the month that contains both Valentines Day and Leap Year.
In fact, they wish you would! The International Space Apps Challenge is looking for folks to create Apps for smartphones and tablets based on any aspect of space research and exploration. In fact it goes beyond that, they are looking for practical applications that will take data from space agencies around the planet and use it to resolve real world problems. Early warning of dangerous weather events as seen from satellites, air and noise pollution mapping, using networks of cell phone as a large aperture telescope are just a few of the recommended ideas. The challenge has not kicked off yet but you can sign up and start submitting ideas now.
Over at NaClBox they are hosting a port of DOSBox to Google’s Native Client playground with one goal in mind: allowing you to play classic DOS games in Chrome. He currently has a limited number of titles set up in demo mode for you to try it out, including Alone in the Dark, the Secret of Monkey Island, and SimCity 2000. All of them play just like the originals, which tells me this VM implementation works great. I was able to play them on a 32 bit XP box, a 64 bit Windows 7 box, a 32 bit Xubuntu box, and just cause I could I then did it on my 64 bit box booting a Knoppix LiveDVD. Not that I recommend that, since all my settings evaporated when I took the disk back out, and Knoppix has its own DOSBox implementation bootable from the xStart GUI or command line menus anyways. I did not have a MAC box to test it on, but it claims to work on them as well.
I am unsure if the goal is to host a bunch of games at that site, but I suspect not. I believe he is trying to develop ports of open source projects like DOSBox for Chrome (the browser and the OS), and that belief is supported by the fact that his source code patch is available for download since this Tuesday so you can figure out how to compile and run your own. My project for this weekend is to see if I can get it built and working here. If I can, I have a few of my own favorite DOS games I look forward to playing again; Gibson’s Neuromancer, Zelazny’s 9 Princes in Amber, and Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Thank Ghod I copied the original 5.25′ floppy’s to 3.5′ floppy’s in the early 90s, and then to CD in the late 90s, because I sure don’t have a working floppy drive of any flavor now. I even still have the original packaging on a few of them, although Leather Goddesses of Phobos looks a lot more sedate than my earlier self remembered.
How does this stuff work? The Google browser Chrome has some built in functionality called Native Client, which basically allows you to embed C or C++ code into your web app. This is currently in Beta, and one of the things that will determine whether it gets widely used or abandoned is how it will overcome the obvious security problems you generate by letting random remote people run programs on your machine. Java already solved that issue with the sandbox and restricted code subset approach to running C online, so there is a good chance Google will get there as well. While having DOSBox in the Chrome browser is an easy fix for windows and apple folks looking to run classic DOS programs in those environments, the real power of this port will be realized by people running those programs on their tablets and smart phones.
Tomorrow kicks off Dragon Con’s Fandom Music Video Awards round number 3. You have from May 1st to July 31st to build and upload your entries, where they can then be viewed and voted on. Bring your best game, though, because a lot of the stuff entered in rounds one and two is pretty impressive, as you can see from these examples.
This is a definite Build Your Own kind of project. The folks over at the NHK have launched a new set of tools, all to make children’s ability to create their own animations easy and educational. Being their countries equivalent of Public Broadcasting, all of the software is free, and they also throw in a lot of video resources to help folks build from. The core group developing all this is the Software Technology Research Laboratory, which has been building new toys and tools since at least 1995. The specific software package we are talking about today is the TVML, or TV program Making Language, a software package you should download now. You can get all the details at the TVML Applications site. You really do want to add this free software to your build-your-own collection, even if you don’t speak Japanese. The TV4U software suite might also be useful for your development…
12 memorable sci-fi movie moments was posted by Blastr just a day or two ago, and the animated GIFs there inspired this article.
Blastr used some elegant animated Sci-Fi GIFs in this one. When I use the phrase elegant while speaking of computers I am referring to using minimal coding to achieve maximum effect. In this instance, the GIF images are fairly high rez, but only a small number of pixels per frame are actually changing state. So, for example, the Moon GIF is 500 pixels wide by 222 pixels tall, weighing in as a very crisp image of 184KB. How can the file size be that small? Around 150KB is the base image, which never changes; a slice of the image 80 pixels wide by 140 pixels tall is the man jogging for 8 to 10 frames which loop back to the beginning.
Just like the MPG video that makes up your broadcast TV or cable signal, they give you the basic image (referred to as a Key Frame) and then only have to give you the pixels that are different in the next frame, and the frame after that, etc., until they come to the next key frame. In that way they have to send you a complete new hi-rez image every half second, or second and a half, and not the 24 to 29 times a second that online and TV video requires. The in between times they only have to update the pixels that are different from the last image, leaving you with a lot less bandwidth to transfer the same amount of visual information.
This particular page of animated GIF images is the best collection I have ever seen for demonstrating these principles. They use several different techniques to achieve these effects as well. The small slice of screen trick that the Moon GIF uses can also be seen in the Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Young Frankenstein animations. The Vertigo and Clockwork Orange animations cover a much larger area of their respective pictures, but use a trick involving the boundaries of an image segment. In both cases the shirt of each character supplies the material to be manipulated (it can be any other object with a border to be flexed), and any given pixel along the edges between the light and dark parts of the picture is set to cycle between 4 to 6 values of brightness and color. The end result is that the difference between one frame and the next is just as small in terms of number of pixels changed (information density), but the visual effect you observe takes on a whole different aspect.
Another technique demonstrated there can be seen in the two different Blade Runner GIF’s, distributed changes. In the Cityscape image, they are distributing 5 different areas of the image as tiny little animation segments, each much smaller than the single area that Moon or Dr. Strangelove gave us, but working on the exact same principles of an upper left and lower right corner for each animated area, with its own defined pixel changes. In the second Blade Runner animation the distributed change is a variation on the Boundary animation style, where this time the boundary is between raindrops and air. Any given onscreen atmospheric pixel only has to cycle between 6 separate values in sequence, and that 6 value range only needs to be defined once for all of them, to be used over and over for each.
There are many more ways to refine your animation (or any other streaming video you are building) for maximum visual effect with minimum bandwidth burned, but these are a few of my basic favorites. Thanks for taking the time to read through this set.