There are less than positive implications sometimes when a Humanoid Robot With AI meets the cold, cruel world. This interpretation on how it might work out is not exactly comforting to the intelligence at the core of this story, and should not make the rest of us feel very easy about it. When the time comes that we face these situations, I hope you are ready to stand up and be counted among those who believe in freedom and justice.
The Variety Artisans series is a collection of interviews that explain how all the stuff at the core of telling a story in a movie format works. This particular one is about the Oscar Ballot Guide: Animation Character Design, where you will learn the major points of making a character the audience will want to follow and become friends with. If you enjoy this one, you may want to watch the entire series.
One of the most exciting fields of engineering is the application of existing principles in totally new ways to solve long standing human-centric problems, and there have been recent breakthroughs on two such problems that will extend help to millions of people.
The GyroGlove is just what it sounds like: a glove with one or more small but intense Gyroscopes attached to it that will help steady the hands of victims of Parkinson’s and other degenerative neural disorders. Being able to shave without slicing your own throat/femoral artery or being able to eat soup without splattering half of the bowl across the table is a given for most folks, but for those who suffer from the trembling such a condition induces it makes all the difference in regaining a life with dignity and control.
For the visually impaired, electronic communication has meant a telephone so you could talk to people, or a (tiny motors driving very tiny vertical rods mechanism slaved to your internet connection) single line of Braille that you would have to read and remember until the next line was built up on the interface, and maybe the next, until you finally held the entire sentence in your mind. The advances in speech-to-text have been tremendous in the last decade, and that has helped, but there is finally a cost effective potential solution for a Braille Tablet. Using microfluidics rather than motors, a whole new class of Braille electronic outputs become available that make it possible to offer a complete screen worth of text rather than a single line, and for a fraction of the previously available outputs price.
These are powerful advances to my mind, offering new help to a lot of people that never had these options before. Even though each solution will only benefit some percentage of their target populations, I can’t help but grin at the thought that we continue to push back the barriers that keep us all from advancing.
Merry Xmas Eve, ya’ll; hope you and yours are together and enjoying the holidays this year. For the final image of this set I am using the Impressionist tool, which gives you a very Vincent Van Gogh kind of virtual painting. I will no doubt be posting more about this type of software soon, or at least the variations of it I have been playing with, once I figure out a bit more about how it all works together.
As I said, when we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and this time the same two pictures are being modified using two different tools from Painter Essentials. While the results of these two processes look similar when you look at the images they created, the parts of the original pictures which were enhanced were quite different. I suspect it is going to take me a while to learn what kind of image requires which tool to bring it to its best advantage, especially considering what its best advantage is will change depending on what I want to use it for. Computer wallpaper, animation background, and 3D model textures each have different ways of presenting the results, for example, with the first a static screen image, the second being shadowed and moved by the characters in the foreground, and the third changing continuously with both the camera viewpoint and the orientation of the scene lighting.
The short animation Descendants is a wonderful and touching piece of work, but thanks to the CG Society publishing of the article it is even more than that; it is an excellent tutorial in animation production. When you read the Making Of, you get an understanding of what some of the challenges are in the animation process, and some of the options available for solving each one. So if you have ever considered making your own animation, watch this amazing example, read the Making Of, and consider how to apply its lessens to your own production.
Descendants from Goro Fujita on Vimeo.