The latest chapter in the groundbreaking Cyberpunk Anime series is Ghost in the Shell: Arise, the story of how the various members of Public Security Section 9 got together and became a team. If you have signed up with Funimation you can stream it from their site, if you don’t have an account with them you can pick up the discs at your favorite Anime supply store. This first showed in theaters in Japan as four feature length films, when they reformatted it into a television series they called it Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Alternative Architecture and added two additional episodes to transition it into the 2015 version of Ghost in the Shell: The Movie.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 is the next gathering place for what started out as the USENET NEWSGROUP Special Interest Group: GRAPHics, taking place November 2nd to the 5th in Kobe, Japan. One of the highlights of every such gathering is their Computer Animation Festival Trailer, giving you a taste of what many of the best minds of the business are working on. It looks like they have some real goodies this time around; enjoy.
This is the first Aurora Official Trailer, and it makes the potential movie look very interesting. In 2020 super-computer Kronos concludes that human beings are the biggest threat to the planet, and takes action. The movie begins in 2080, when Andrew meets Calia, a girl heading back to robot-free Aurora and latches on to her for dear life. This is yet another of those movies where frail humans like ourselves go toe-to-toe against our Evil Robot Overlords, and I have to tell you, our prospects are not great. But we might just have a chance. This Swiss science fiction film looks like it has some potential, and I hope I get a chance to check it out on the big screen.
If you didn’t make SIGGRAPH 2015, and I didn’t, there isn’t much I can say that will make sense about this Emerging Technologies Contributor. I know Shogyo Mujo isn’t a person, but more a process and team effort. Specifically, Shogyo Mujo utilizes 360-degree projection mapping to take an artistic sculpture to the next level by projecting the images, suitably distorted to map across the physical surface in ways that capture our gaze, as artwork that pulsates to the music. I found it a bit hypnotic to tell the truth, and plan to try my hand at this newly created art form whenever I can find the time to experiment with it.
When it comes to programming a swarm of robots, the question has always been do you program from the top down or the bottom up? According to the Technology Review, you no longer have to decide between programming each robot individually or programming the flock as if it were a single entity. Carlo Pinciroli and a collection of his friends and colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal have come up with Buzz, a programming language that allows you to combine both kinds of commands into a single language. It allows you to tweak the two kinds of command structures to any level of detail you feel is required, and it scales easily to control any size of swarm. If that weren’t enough, they have started building and collecting libraries of program modules of common swarming behavior that researchers and hobbyists can drop into their own programming projects. That means for the first time swarm programmers can actually share their work in a common environment, and not have to be constantly reinventing the wheel someone else already solved.
According to the article Pinciroli did at RoboHub the language syntax was inspired by JavaScript and Python, meaning it should be instantly familiar to any programmer, cutting down on the learning curve involved. And the base run time platform itself is so lean it only takes 12KB, so you can do meaningful programming in the smallest of robots. It also interfaces nicely with other types of languages, such as the ROS, or Robot Operating System. The most exciting part? They released it as open-source software under the MIT license. It can be downloaded at The Swarming Buzz, so you can start programming your hoard of Evil Robot Overlords today!
This really isn’t a post in and of itself. Actually it is just a place for me to upload an image file and test it against my browser. I will do a valid post a bit later today, or tomorrow, or the day after that, I suspect.
