Posted: February 25th, 2011 | Author: rugenius | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
Samuel Granados makes 3d infographic maps from lego. One side of the map shows the immigrants, the other side shows the emigrants.
(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)
Posted: February 18th, 2011 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
Advertising we can get behind: An international language-teaching company called EF (Education First) has produced a series of byoooootiful short videos encapsulating the spirit of four world cities, to build the desire to visit them and take some language lessons. The Paris one made me want to go back so badly I felt pangs in my stomach, which is currently filled with bad American food.
It's a Friday, so treat yourself to a viewing. If your boss catches you, do that thing where you apologize and hurriedly scratch your temple using a certain finger.
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Posted: February 10th, 2011 | Author: Leena Rao | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, has hit a milestone today. The startup is now tracking over 100 million monthly active users and over 15 billion messages per month. That’s up from 70 million monthly active users in October.
Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers, game studios and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social event interaction and other variables. The new version allows developers to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, currency monetization, and more.
The startup, which has raised $6 million, to date, also extends its analytics platform to iPhone and web applications using Facebook Connect.
The company says that it has grown its monthly active user base by over 300% in the past 12 months and counts a number of well known game developers as clients, including EA, Sony, Ubisoft, Take2, THQ, Konami, Perfect World, Gaia and Tencent.
Posted: February 9th, 2011 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
I had to laugh when I saw this package design. (With, not at.) Soy Mamelle's container, designed by Russian creative agency Kian, is meant to drive home the point that the soy-based product is milk-like. In an era when most food packaging takes great pains to sensorially divorce the end-product from the smelly animal it (in this case ostensibly) came from, the Soy Mamelle bottle adopts the form of a squeezable latex cow udder.
Sure it's false advertising on some levels, since soymilk doesn't come from a cow and squeezing the nipples doesn't cause milk to shoot out of them -- it's got a regular cap and threaded bottle opening up top -- but you can't beat it for shelf presence and triggering people's "I must touch that" instinct.
The bottle also comes in a smaller glass version, but that's just weird; the whole point, I think, is that the packaging is soft and udder-like.
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Posted: February 2nd, 2011 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
I've always wanted to see Botticelli's Birth of Venus in person at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and now, thanks to Google, I can. Launched today, Google Art Project is like a google maps tour of the inside of 17 of the world's most respected museums including the Tate Britain (London), State Hermitage (St. Petersburg), Palace of Versailles and hometown favorites the Metropolitan Musuem and the Museum of Modern Art. Each museum allows navigation through specific galleries through interactive floorplans. There is even a piece of work available as a 1GB download for each museum. In the example below, the detail view of Chris Ofili's No Woman No Cry is accompanied by the backstory about working with the artist.
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Posted: January 25th, 2011 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
From a cognitive development standpoint, you could argue that the strength of Lego is also its only drawback: The parts are standardized. Which is to say, a child never has to think about the connections or the materials, as they're both fixed. They are free to create--as long as they remain within the boundaries of what the building blocks are capable of.
Enter Makedo, which is something like Lego for the real world. It's a system of connectors that lets the child join a variety of material together, paper cups, cardboard, empty boxes, and whatever else you've got laying around. A series of simple (and safely blunted) tools enable the child to perform primitive construction operations and modify materials to accept the connectors, truly reinforcing the notion that you can shape the world around you with a little imagination and elbow grease.
How to makedo - extended from MAKEDO on Vimeo.
via treehugger
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Posted: January 25th, 2011 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
For anyone blessed with a LinkedIn account, this might be quite interesting: InMaps [linkedinlabs.com] is new service that visualizes the collection of a LinkedIn 'connections' as a single network graph. The work was clearly inspired by the results from the interactive visualization and exploration platform Gephi, as Mathieu Bastian, the driving force behind the Gephi project, now works at LinkedIn Labs.
Each color corresponds to a different group within the professional network, which can be labeled by the user. The graph should allow users to recognize connections that share mutual people, or indentify areas that might be underrepresented.
See also Career Paths.
Thnkx Nicholas and Armando.
Posted: January 24th, 2011 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2010 was abuzz about a slew of prototype 3-D TVs, but if new research from the MIT Media Lab is any indication, holographic TVs could be close behind. At the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers’ (SPIE) Practical Holography conference in San Francisco the weekend of Jan. 23, members of Michael Bove’s Object-Based Media Group presented a new system that can capture visual information using off-the-shelf electronics, send it over the Internet to a holographic display, and update the image at rates approaching those of feature films.
In November, researchers at the University of Arizona
made headlines with an experimental holographic-video transmission system that used 16 cameras to capture data and whose display refreshed every two seconds. The new MIT system uses only one data-capture device — the new Kinect camera designed for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming system — and averages about 15 frames per second. Moreover, the MIT researchers didn’t get their hands on a Kinect until the end of December, and only in the week before the conference did they double the system’s frame rate from seven to 15 frames per second. They’re confident that with a little more time, they can boost the rate even higher, to the 24 frames per second of feature films or the 30 frames per second of TV — rates that create the illusion of continuous motion.
The difference between holograms and the type of 3-D images becoming common in movie theaters is frequently overlooked, Bove says. During a screening of, say, the 3-D version of
Avatar, viewers on the far-left aisle of the theater see the same image that viewers on the far-right aisle do. That image may have depth, but it’s filmed from a single perspective. As a viewer moves around a hologram, however, his or her perspective on the depicted object changes continuously, just as it would if the object were real.
All the anglesA standard 3-D movie camera captures light bouncing off of an object at two different angles, one for each eye. But in the real world, light bounces off of objects at an infinite number of angles. Holographic video systems use devices that produce so-called diffraction fringes, fine patterns of light and dark that can bend the light passing through them in predictable ways. A dense enough array of fringe patterns, each bending light in a different direction, can simulate the effect of light bouncing off of a three-dimensional object.
The challenge with real-time holographic video is taking video data — in the case of the Kinect, the light intensity of image pixels and, for each of them, a measure of distance from the camera — and, on the fly, converting that data into a set of fringe patterns. Bove and his grad students — James Barabas, David Cranor, Sundeep Jolly and Dan Smalley — have made that challenge even tougher by limiting themselves to off-the-shelf hardware.
“Really, the focus of our work in digital holography — and I think this makes us pretty much unique among the very small community of people in the world even doing holovideo — is that we’re trying to make a consumer product,� Bove says. “So we’ve been saying, ‘How do you make it as cheap as possible — take advantage of hardware and standards and software and everything else that already exists?’ Because that’s the quickest way to bring it to market.�
Using a single Kinect camera and standard graphics chips, MIT researchers demonstrate the highest frame rate yet for streaming holographic video. Video: Melanie Gonick; additional stills: James D. Barabas In the group’s lab setup, the Kinect feeds data to an ordinary laptop, which relays it over the Internet. At the receiving end, a PC with three commercial graphics processing units — GPUs — computes the diffraction patterns.
GPUs differ from ordinary computer chips — CPUs — in that their circuitry has been tailored to a cluster of computationally intensive tasks that arise frequently during the processing of large graphics files. Much of the work that went into the new system involved re-describing the problem of computing diffraction patterns in a way that takes advantage of GPUs’ strengths.
Coming attractionsThe one component of the researchers’ experimental system that can’t be bought at an electronics store for a couple hundred dollars is the holographic display itself. It’s the result of decades of research that began with MIT’s
Stephen Benton, who built the first holographic video display in the late 1980s. (When Benton died in 2003, Bove’s group inherited the holographic-video project.) The current project uses a display known as the Mark-II, a successor to Benton’s original display that both Benton’s and Bove’s groups helped design. But Bove says that his group is developing a new display that is much more compact, produces larger images, and should also be cheaper to manufacture. (Bove and his students reported on an early version of the display at the same SPIE conference four years ago.)
Mark Lucente, director of display products for Zebra Imaging in Austin, Texas, which is commercializing holographic displays for videoconferencing applications, says that his company’s prospective customers are often uncomfortable with the sheer computational intensity of holographic video. “It’s very daunting,� he says. “1.5 gigabytes per second are being generated on the fly.� By demonstrating that off-the-shelf components can keep up with the computational load, Lucente says, Bove’s group is “helping show that it’s within the realm of possibility.� Indeed, he says, “by taking a video game and using it as an input device, [Bove] shows that it’s a hop, skip and a jump away from reality.�
When the Media Lab researchers demonstrate their new technology at the conference in San Francisco, another grad student in Bove’s group, Edwina Portocarrero, sporting a cowled tunic and a wig with side buns, will re-enact the scene from the first Star Wars movie in which a hologram of Princess Leia implores Obi-Wan Kenobi to re-join the battle against the evil empire. The resolution of the real hologram won’t be nearly as high as that of the special-effects hologram in the movie, but as Bove points out, “Princess Leia wasn’t being transmitted in real time. She was stored.�
Posted: January 23rd, 2011 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
Designers Nien Lam and Susan Ngo have collaborated to warn us of the risks of our pollution-heavy urban lifestyles on our bodily organs through fashion. In the presence of carbon monoxide, the "Warning Signs" wearables subtly change colour from a healthy pink to a slightly worrying grey.
Although presumably little more than an evocative concept, we're suitably impressed by the pairs production prowess. Take the jump for a couple of vids from their making phase —including the intriguing effects of a laser cutter on thermochromatic textile.
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