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 fun little video edit was put together by the very creative Debbie Saslaw, and is just what its title infers: a supercut of the phrase There’s No Time To Explain. If you have some video editing software and a favorite phrase you see in TV and movies all the time, you could build one of these yourself, and I know for myself it would be a good practice project to help me overcome my editing suites learning curve. I think the first thing I might learn is that this kind of project is a bit harder than it looks. Thanks to Laughing Squid 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 builder of this 2 foot tall (OK, 60 centimeters, but who’s counting?) robot incarnation of Hatsune Miku goes by the name of Rozen Zebet, and he released this video Saturday to show just how good his replicant is. While I personally like the holographic versions they use for the live stage performances, this one is quite tasty, and definitely shows some of the improvements robotics have come up with in recent years. Thanks to the Anime News Network for the heads up on this one.
While this is a nice little astronomy video, it isn’t really about the stars at all. When you go to the 100,000 Stars web site the really interesting thing is the demonstration of WebGL. Currently WebGL is implemented by default in the latest release of Chrome, and it is available in Safari, Firefox, and Opera, but you have to turn it on to use it (get activation instructions). I am sure no one is going to be shocked or surprised that WebGL also requires a fairly robust and recent graphics card, and even with that you may need to grab the latest drivers for it. While this should work on most tablets, smart phone implementation is still problematic.