Ceci n'est pas un stade

With the Olympics round the corner a lot of gadgetry is already available.
These speakers are made for use with MP3, iPods, or latops, with a design inspired by the Olympic National Stadium. They connect with a USB cable or AC adapter and each have an output power of 2W.
Surely Herzog & de Meuron will love it.

Wacky Japanese widget

It shows the time, and the blossoms fall when you scroll over them. Sweet.

More here: http://www.bitstep.jp/blogparts/gallery/

The Rave Generator

Simple interaction, hours of old skool fun!
thanks Zoe.
Check it out on www.ravegenerator.com/

Look at what they did to Kylie

2057 - The City of the Future

What scientists and technology developers have accomplish and plan to have accomplished by 2057. Hosted by Michio Kaku.

Watch the video here | digg story

Sifferent yet diffimilar

Biomechanical work by artificial limb designer and hobbyist robotics engineer stroke artist Christopher Conte. His robotic objects are fully articulated and he makes them from scratch, assembling antique parts and seeing what comes together.
More here and on his website .

lineman

British artist Paul Fryer has created a large scale installation commissioned for the Guido Costa Projects gallery in Turin. In Loving Memory is born out of Paul Fryer's research into the origins of technology and the labyrinths of science. The elements used to construct the artwork are stainless steel, wax, Plexiglas, human hair, Tesla coils, computer, light system.

The work is inspired by an event which made news at the end of the 19th century. A Western Union lineman, John Feeks, employed alongside others to hang the thousands of kilometres of wire connecting one building to another and providing the city of New York with electricity and information was accidentally electrocuted and his corpse dangled for hours in a tangle of wires above the Manhattan streets, to the horror of thousands of onlookers. His fate became symbol of the perils of technological progress.



More on we-make-money-not-art.com

Talent from Holland

Grown on the body



Exploded view

'Lucy and Bart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and body. Explosive_high impact_suggestive photography, with no specific intention, other than to make and metabolise.'
More here.



Dripping Colour

David Lynch on product placement

David Lynch on watching movies on your iPhone

Assassin's Creed game of the year?

A post from JB, Ubisoft, Paris

... Likely to be the most beautiful one, at least. The new Ubisoft release came out last week on Xbox360.
Here is a 10 mn video review .

10mns too long? Go straight to 4''30' on the timeline to see the character climbing, his hands and feet naturally adapting to surfaces, and some roof to roof free running.

brinkmobile

The idea behind the brinkmobile is to occupy public spaces, and inhabit them with parties, video talk shows, art events, film and media.
There are two identical brinkmobiles and a third will hopefully be built soon.
These beautiful vintage machines have a lot of appeal, so people like to come inside, where cameras record everything that’s going on.

Check out the company’s website , and their niche market DVD company .

Recognise that little Prada store?

Yuck

Details here.

Tony Alleyne

Tony Alleyne, 54, is a Star Trek fan who turned his flat into a replica of a Star Trek ship. He sold it on the 16th of May for a massive £425,000.
Alleyne spent two years and £30,000 turning his one-bed studio flat in Hinckley, Leicestershire, into a detailed copy of the starship Voyager's flight deck. He put his flat up for sale on eBay a month ago with a guide price of £130,000 - £50,000.
He originally themed his one-bed home on Captain Kirk’s famous Enterprise spaceship and tried to sell it for £1.25MILLION, but could not find a buyer. He then updated it to a replica of the later Voyager version.
The winning bid was made by a millionaire Birmingham businessman.

The flat is fully equipped with LCARS, Ops units, voice activated lighting, back-lit panelling, various lighting effects, Transporter Pads and a full scale Transporter Control Console with built in sound effects.

Alleyne started work on the flat two years ago after his marriage broke down.
Last February he filed for bankruptcy but despite going bankrupt, he refit the flat using income support payments.



The kitchen.

Ever seen this?

This diamond mine is in Mirny, Eastern Siberia. It is 525m deep and 1200m in diameter. The world's largest diamond mine, but not the the largest man-made excavation on earth, which is apparently Bingham Canyon copper mine, Utah, US (805m deep and 4000m in diameter).
What is striking with the Mirny mine is the difference in scale with the city standing at the edge of the pit. The surrounding air zone is closed for helicopters after a few accidents when they were 'sucked in' by downward air flow.



The red arrow points to a giant truck called a ‘Bellaz’.

Here is a picture of a Bellaz.

Designers visuals for your desktop, free to download

From Claire in Paris

Fed up with XP’s green hill? Embarrassed about exhibiting ‘another baby’s face’ in the office? Feel like a new landscape every Monday morning?
Check out desktopography.net, a user-friendly Web 2.0 site, where you can pick from 3 collections exhibited online.

Shame no credit to the mysterious ‘selected designers’ appear anywhere, but hey, this all about YOU.

Collaborative online dance mashups

Chris Elam’s New York based dance company, Misnomer Dance Theater just launched a video remix contest.

Misnomer uploaded one of their dance videos to the video editing site Jumpcut and users can create their own mashup (mix) by editing the video and adding their own audio and video clips.

Here's a screenshot of the editing options for Jumpcut:


All submitted posts will be reviewed and favorites will be put up on the Misnomer site to be voted upon and viewed. On July 1st the top 5 will be selected and will be awarded with free performance tickets, backstage passes, etc.

This initiative is part of a larger project by Brett Gaylor - a user-generated collaborative documentary. Online video editing software Jumpcut made this project possible to execute.

In his manifesto, Brett says:
The traditional approach to creating films, especially documentary films, is flawed. A single perspective cannot hope to capture the nuance of an evolving cultural debate. Sure, Point of View is important. But “The Ecstasy of Influence”, the participatory nature of digital creativity, begs us to create media that invites input from its audience.

Mohuan Shouji

Chinese central government network CCTV is launching a new fantasy drama inspired by SMS technology.
The story, written by Chris Chaplin, is fresh from Beijing:

"Imagine Superman, Monkey King, time travel, martial arts and state-of-the-art technology all rolled into one. Sorry for that mental image, but this is what Mohuan Shouji (or "Magic Cellphone") promises when it hits the small screen in November. This "modern" fantasy television drama series brings up a concept that human beings can actually be transported through SMS (we have heard rumors that Shanghai officials and mobile phone service providers are actually planning on launching this functionality ... by 2010, the magical year when all of our dreams will come true).
The story (plot in Chinese) starts when a cellphone robot travels through a time tunnel — the Bund Tourist Tunnel? — and arrives in ancient times, where she meets characters from Chinese mythology such as Monkey King. Then she is brought back to 2006 and looks for her owner. The owner, the lead role in the show, gained supernatural powers from the cellphone, naturally, and began a mission to save the world. We want some of whatever the creators of this show were smoking.
Mohuan Shouji is brought to you by well-known CCTV producer Li Gongda and billed as the first ever fantasy TV series in China (because all of the other Chinese shows featuring people who fly around and perform kung fu and sorcery are based on fact). The cast includes famous Taiwanese actor Jiao Enjun, young Chinese actor Cui Lin, who played lead role in Beijing Bicycle, and famous TV host Chen Qian. We actually first learned of Mohuan Shouji via this thread on tianya.cn

Apparently 99% of the readers’ first reaction was, “Yuck! How could CCTV produce such a cheesy show?” Our reaction: Haven't these people watched CCTV before? We're pretty sure at least one of those Cs stands for "cheesy."

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 on X360 to be released soon!!!

Some grawling news from JB, professional player in Paris:

It has been 1 year since I joined the game development team of Ubisoft Paris, to help create a sequel to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (or GRAW as we fondly call it) on Microsoft’s X360. The game is now finished and we are waiting for the discs to be manufactured and put in stores (8th March if everything goes fine). You may even see some TV adds early March…

It is a tactical action game, with lots of shooting, running, flanking, driving tanks and helicopters and giving orders to squads of teammates. If you played GRAW1, you know how good it was (it got the Best Game of the Year awards for X360 in nearly every web site or magazine in the world).

GRAW2 is just better, bigger and nicer.

The story takes place in Mexico in 2014. You are an elite soldier in a mission to save the Mexican President… and your country, from a terrorist threat
(OK, OK, I know… we saw too many episodes of 24 ;-).
Come here for more information on the game.
You may even see my (tired) face in some blogs .

Here are a few pictures, to show you the kind of things we can do today (everything in the following pictures is displayed in 3D and in real time). Honestly, the graphical features presented here are among the absolute best in the video game industry (si, si !! ;-)


Over 50000 polygons for highly detailed character models.


Real-time smoke, fire and weather effects (rain, mist, wind)…


Advanced lightning techniques, that allow us to modify the day/night cycle in real time.


Big explosions and special effects



Our objective : to put you in the middle of war zone, with all its chaos, noise and stress!!

Watch some videos on gamespot.com .

The future of morphable models… or how to see Mona Lisa smile in 3D !!!

More from JB:

Have a look at this 5 minutes video, demonstrating a probable breakthrough in face recognition programs. I got the info because this kind of techniques will probably be used in future video games…

It shows several things: first, how we can program the facial expression of 3D models. Second, how we can identify the features of a face from a simple 2D photos and turn it into a full 3D model !

The video is fantastic, with very simple technical explanations.
Two examples:


Have you ever seen La Joconde from this side??


The 2 images on the right were created using only the information contained in the image on the left!