This is from back in 2014, but I only found it this week, courtesy of Laughing Squid. The amount of video available these days is staggering, and the surprise is not that we miss things, but that we manage to keep up with it at all. Even though it’s old, it struck a chord with me, so I had to share it.
Pixar in a Box is a free online animation training curriculum developed as a joint venture by Pixar and the Khan Academy. The classes include effects, character modeling, rigging, sets and staging, and rendering, as well as a number of important topics that may not have occurred to you are part of the process. I am signing up with Khan Academy (mostly so I can save my progress and don’t have to wonder where I am on a given course) and checking out the wide range of free math, science, and computer programming online classes they have to offer, starting with the animation training. That isn’t all they have of course; history, art, economics, and many more topics are also available. But I only have so many hours a day that aren’t spent at work, so I have to choose which classes I take carefully. To give you an idea of what they have on offer, here is the Pixar class overview that they start the training with.
There will be 85 hours of VR programming coming out of the Olympics watchable by way of the NBC Sports app. Sadly the plan is to make this only available to Samsung Galaxy smartphones compatible with Gear VR, and that only after logging in with their pay TV provider. I fully understand and agree with the need to authenticate viewers before allowing them access to their premium content; they are paying an awful lot of money to get the exclusive distribution rights, after all. But there are a lot of us VR junkies running everything from Google Cardboard with an iPhone or non-Samsung android phone, on up to the Oculus Rift crowd driving their $500 VR headsets with their $1,500 computers with the massive graphics cards, who could be watching this programming if they would allow us a paid authentication path into it as well.
Still, this is the very first time any VR access to the Olympics has ever been available, and the second major sporting event to be hosted in this format this year (the first being the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which came with a Google Cardboard viewer you could fold up and use with your smartphone to view the photo shoots in VR). There is a good chance their app builders have only been able to make it work on the Samsung version of Android so far, limiting it to the Gear. I certainly can’t imagine they don’t want to sell the programing to every one they could, although if they didn’t develop the VR app themselves they may be at the mercy of the contracts signed by the folks who did create it. So I for one will be keeping my fingers crossed that they manage to deploy it to the iPhone iOS and other Android builds in time for the rest of us to sign up for it and enjoy it during the Olympics. Although we wont be able to see it live; there is a bit of a delay in editing and processing the stereo 360 degree SuperHD 8K video into a formatted stream that can be fed to the app, and yes, that is a 4K movie theater resolution video stream for each eye. And even if they don’t have a way to deliver it to anything but a Gear for the Olympics themselves, once they have it recorded the rest of us can enjoy it down the road when they do get the app working for all the other platforms. Thanks to VR Scout for the heads up on this one.
SIGGRAPH 2016 is coming up on July 24th through the 28th in Anaheim, California this year, and one of mt favorite tracks is their Computer Animation Festival, so I had to post the trailer for it. The name is from their original newsgroup identifier from the Internet’s early days, Special Interest Group, GRAPHics. This gathering is the 43rd international conference and exhibition on
Computer Graphics & Interactive Techniques, in case you were wondering how long ago those early days were, and they didn’t hold these every year during the first decade. How important this event is to the creators of these excellent animations can be explained by saying it has been their version of the Academy Awards since the late 70s. How important it is to the rest of us is best expressed by this quote from their web site:
The Computer Animation Festival is recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifying festival. Since 1999, several works originally presented in the Computer Animation Festival have been nominated for or have received a Best Animated Short Academy Award.
It is not too late to make this year’s gathering; the deadline for registering and getting the discounted registration fees is July 1st. Entering your creations to the event is already over, though, but there is always next year!
BBC Click put together the first ever TV episode recorded entirely in 360 degrees for VR headsets, although it can also be viewed on the desktop or with a mobile phone. They have a bunch of good content, like a helicopter ride to a glacier, a glimpse of computer game SUPERHOT, and a visit to the world’s largest physics experiment (CERN, of course). But I particularly liked the bit where they told us how they made the show, with some ideas about how the rest of us could get into creating our own 360 videos.
TV has The X-Files: The Event Series, also called Season 10 coming out this week, the long awaited return to the small screen. Movies bring us London Has Fallen, and while I can’t decide if it belongs in the science fiction or fantasy category I know it has to be in one of them. We also get 10 Cloverfield Lane, which I would have written off as Horror if so many critics hadn’t referred to it as a Sci-Fi Thriller and given it great reviews.
In Anime Sword Art Online: Extra Edition is the four Summer Special episodes that took place between seasons 1 and 2. As with previous disc releases from this title, I feel it is overpriced at $10 per episode when the normal going rate is 1 to 2 dollars per episode. Until someone releases this at a realistic price point I will continue to watch it streaming rather than adding it to my permanent collection.