Jim Kramer uses strobes, water coloring, and high-speed photography to create works of art.

Jim Kramer is an amateur photographer, but his subjects aren’t waterfalls or cityscapes. He narrows his focus on a natural process that most of us see everyday but rarely take notice of. He captures the beautiful shapes found in drops of water. His palette is made up of water coloring, and he uses liquids like glycerol and dishwashing soap to alter the water’s consistency.

The Flickr photo has notes on Kramer’s setup, which one comment lauded as “technically impressing, creatively remarkable.” The images are taken against the frosted plexiglass backdrop panels. He uses seven Yongnua YN-560 strobes controlled by a strobe distribution box that allows up to eight strobes to be triggered simultaneously. And the drops of colored liquid fall from a Mariotte siphon that sits in the silver ring at the top of his setup. The height of the siphon can be changed. Right now it sits at a height of two feet above the water surface.

High-speed digital cameras capture beautiful shapes that result as droplets smack the water’s surface. He’s doing some really magical photography, just take a look at his High Speed Water Drop Collection. Admittedly off topic for us, but what a joy to look at, like the longterm exposures of Roomba Art. Many more pictures can be found on Kramer’s Flickr page. I’ve included Kramer’s own titles and descriptions of the images.

Edge Bleed: This is a glycol crown shot on black plexi with a single drop of red food coloring on one side of the drop zone.

Drop Collision: Red/Blue High Speed Water Drop Collision

Liquid Mercury: This is a glycol crown on a piece of partially water covered black plexiglass. It has a metal feel to me

Crowning Moment: The moment just before the formation of the crown. The disk on the bottom is the primer drop of glycol. The surface is black plexi. Lighting is from 4 Yongnuo YN-560's behind a piece of opaque white plexi.

Singing In The Rain: I can't seem to find the words to describe this one... I'm anxiously awaiting to hear the comments... I hope you love it as much as I do!

All the color in this shot comes from the gels. I used (2) Green, (1) Yellow, and (1) Blue on the backdrop strobes. In fact, this shot had the least amount of post of any shot in recent memory. I simply cloned out a couple stray drops, and did normal adjustments

Flammenco Danseuse: In this shot I intentionally created some waves in the drop tank prior to releasing the drops. I like the way the reflection is disturbed in this one. This is a triple drop collision shot, with the very beginning of the crown on top of the umbrella. Thanks RoyalDuck for the title (yet again!)

Four Color Crown: Same type of shot as the last one, this time 4 colors were used in the drop zone (red, green, yellow, and purple). Thanks for looking, commenting, and fav'ing my photos! I appreciate ALL! Somebody on Reddit mentioned that it looks like the Google Chrome logo exploded... I thought that was an interesting observation... it kinda does, doesn't it?

Red and Blue: I shot 3 strobes through a red background, and used blue gels over the front strobes for this shot. Getting enough light for the shot was tough, you lose a lot of light shooting through colors.

[image credits: IR Cincy Jim's photostream via Flickr]
images: High Speed Water Drop Collisions

The Pandora of movies. Films by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation are clips pieced together by a computer algorithm.

Indie movie makers can be a strange bunch, pushing the envelope of their craft and often losing us along the way. In any case, if you’re going to produce something unintelligible anyway, why not let a computer do it? Eve Sussmam and the Rufus Corporation did just that. She and lead actor Jeff Wood traveled to the Kazakhstan border of the Caspian Sea for two years of filming. But instead of a movie with a beginning, middle and end, they shot 3,000 individual and unrelated clips. To the clips they added 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music, mixed it all together and put it in a computer. A program on her Mac G5 tower, known at Rufus as the “serendipity machine,” then splices the bits together to create a final product.

As you might imagine, the resultant film doesn’t always make sense. But that’s part of the fun! As the Rufus Corporation writes on their website, “The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes.”

It’s a clever experiment even if some viewers end up wanting to gouge their eyes out after a sitting. And there is some method to their madness. The film, titled “whiteonwhite:algorithnoir,” is centered on a geophysicist named Holz (played by Wood) who’s stuck in a gloomy, 1970’s-looking city operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Distinct scenes such as wire tapped conversations or a job interview for Mr. Holz are (hopefully) woven together by distinct voiceovers and dialogues. When the scenes and audio are entered into the computer they’re tagged with keywords. The program then pieces them together in a way similar to Pandora’s stringing together of like music. If a clip is tagged “white,” the computer will randomly select from tens of other clips also having the “white” tag. The final product is intended to be a kind of “dystopian futuropolis.” What that means, however, changes with each viewing as no two runs are the same.

Watching the following trailer, I actually got a sense…um, I think…of a story.

Rufus Corporation says the movie was “inspired by Suprematist quests for transcendence, pure space and artistic higher ground.” I have no idea what that means but I hope they’ve achieved it. Beautiful things can happen when computers create art. And it’s only a matter of time before people attempt the same sort of thing with novel writing. Just watching the trailer, it’s hard to tell if the movie’s any good or not. I missed the showings at the Sundance Film Festival, but even so, they probably didn’t resemble the trailer anyway. And that’s okay, because that’s the whole point.

[image credits: Rufus Corporation and PRI via YouTube]
[video credit: PRI via YouTube]
image 1: whiteonwhite
image 2: Rufus
video: whiteonwhite

Blue Marble (1972):

Taken on December 7, 1972 aboard the Apollo 17 during its mission to the moon, this photograph was the first of its kind to successfully capture the southern ice cap. Since NASA first released it, this image has become one of the most iconic, and recognizable pictures of the globe ever taken.

Image Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

Blue Marble (1997):

25 years after the original Blue Marble, NASA compiled the latest in satellite images to create this anniversary portrait. While the base image was taken on September 9, 1997, vegetation and oceanic coloring was created using data collected throughout the fall of that year. That coloring data was draped over topographical models created by the U.S. Geological Survey. The completed computer file for this portrait was 26 MB, making it one of the largest ever taken by NASA at that time (though that’s only equivalent to less than 10 photos shot with an iPhone 4S). The moon in the image is an artistic conceit, created from a 1994 photo swollen to twice its relative size.

Image Credit: Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler

Blue Marble (2001):


Collected from June to September of 2001, this image integrates various land, ocean, and atmospheric readings almost entirely gathered by MODIS. Photos were taken every eight days to avoid cloud images that may block the sensors. Visuals of city lights were gathered over nine months and superimposed. The entire globe was captured in this model with the true-color represented accurately for every square kilometer of the surface – allowing for both sides of the planet to be shown. At the time of release it was the most high definition, true-color, image of the Earth to date.

Image Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds). Enhancements by Robert Simmon (ocean color, compositing, 3D globes, animation). Data and technical support: MODIS Land Group; MODIS Science Data Support Team; MODIS Atmosphere Group; MODIS Ocean Group Additional data: USGS EROS Data Center (topography); USGS Terrestrial Remote Sensing Flagstaff Field Center (Antarctica); Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (city lights).

Blue Marble 2012:

The newest Blue Marble was created from images collected by VIIRS during four orbits on the Suomi NPP satellite around January 4th, 2012. The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) was recently renamed for Verner E. Suomi, considered by NASA to be the father of satellite meterology. With that name change comes a focus on improving understanding of Earth’s weather and improving forecasts to never before seen levels of accuracy. In a sun-synchronous orbit, Suomi NPP passes over each portion of the Earth at roughly the same local time, allowing each section photographed to be exposed to approximately the same light level. This latest Blue Marble once again represents the current pinnacle of NASA terrestrial imaging power.

Image Credits: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

The NPP Satellite was just launched in October 2011 and from its position 512 miles above the surface it continually collects images of the Earth in sections about 3 million meters across (~1900 miles). The following image, though not a member of the Blue Marble series, demonstrates how these large wedge photos can be overlain together to form a complete view of the planet. Well, almost complete, for this image the North Pole was not able to be photographed due to a lack of sunlight during the winter season.

Image Credit: NPP Land Product Evaluation and Testing Element

Blue Marble 2012 represents forty years of NASA sharing its celestial view with humanity. From well timed photographs on long-range manned missions, to artistically compiled images, to data driven models, to automated observations gathered by satellites, these portraits give us a unique perspective on Earth. Humanity’s commitment to science and exploration has provided a point of view we could have never achieved otherwise. It may feel like we’re simply stuck on a warm wet rock hurtling through space, but Blue Marble reminds us that we live on a wondrous, beautiful planet.

[image credits: as listed in text]
[source: NASA, Suomi NPP]

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the eighth installment of the popular first-person shooter.

Modern Warfare 3 (MW3), the eighth in the Call of Duty series, made an astonishing $400 million in sales in the first 24 hours after it launched on November 8, 2011. Furthermore, Activision recently announced that the first-person shooter game became the fastest entertainment product to hit $1 billion in global sales. Hitting that target in 16 days, MW3 edged out the Hollywood film Avatar, which previously accomplished the same feat in 17 days. Activision’s press release drew other parallels between Call of Duty and movie franchises. First, it pointed out the decline in box office revenue last year, although recent data from the NPD group shows video game sales down 8% from 2010 (and yet app sales are skyrocketing…1.2 billion apps downloaded worldwide in the last week of 2011. What?!?!?). Then, it drew parallels between the Call of Duty game series and movie franchises like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and the Lord of the Rings. Even though Activision’s press release was short and to the point, in between the lines was a message to Hollywood: video games are coming to claim the top spot on all of entertainment’s leaderboards.

Consider the recent global projections from PricewaterhouseCoopers about the entertainment industry. The film industry made $84 billion in 2010. Thanks to 3D, Blu-ray, and broadband streaming to  electronic devices, the firm projects that the movie industry will grow 6.1% annually to $113 billion in 2015. In that same window of time, video games, which made $56 billion in 2010, are expected to see 8.2% annual growth to $82 billion. This means that the video game industry is growing at a faster rate and will eventually catch up to film, if nothing else stays the same (like Hollywood being able to draw people in as TV’s become more sophisticated).

But it’s difficult to tell if these projections take into account three important factors. The first is that video games are a sector actively embracing innovation much more than the film industry has in recent years, 3D being the lone exception. The second is that innovations, such as Facebook’s API, social gaming, and tablets like the iPad, have created entirely new segments for video game development, but in contrast, the film industry can only use these platforms as delivery devices for the same content, not brand new content just for those platforms (with the exception of web series, which are not contenders for significant revenue). With technological advances and digital innovation on a streak, odds are in the next five years avenues for new game markets will open up to a much larger degree than they will for film. Finally, everyone is thinking about games from businesses using gamification strategies in advertising to educations exploring serious games for revitalizing dry subjects locked in antiquated teaching methods. Games are becoming a bigger part of everybody’s lives.

Image from The Economist based on PricewaterhouseCoopers data

So in light of these trends, it makes sense why Activision would put movie franchises in its crosshairs. Collectively, the Call of Duty games have brought in over $4 billion since 2003. Compare that to the biggest movie franchise, Harry Potter, which holds a worldwide gross of $7.7 billion, followed by James Bond at $5.1 billion, and Star Wars at $4.4 billion. Now in light of the fact MW3 is still selling and Activision has already stated that another Call of Duty game is coming in 2012 (and the domain name for Black Ops 2 was recently acquired), the franchise will likely surpass these franchises in a few years. Now we all know that Harry Potter and Star Wars are more than just movies, as they include a much larger scope of products such as books, toys, and yes, video games. So the question is: can the Call of Duty franchise realistically expand beyond the video game format?

For better or for worse, Activision is trying to answer that question by pushing the limits of what a game franchise can be. Let’s start with its new service Call of Duty Elite, which delivers a steady stream of 20 batches of downloadable content over the next 9 months (it also recently got a free iOS app with stat analysis). Launched at the same time as MW3, the service has 6 million subscribers, with 1 million of those paying the annual $50 fee to be premium players. While downloadable content for games is something that online platforms like Steam have been doing for years, the rate at which it is coming out for MW3 is almost like a weekly TV show. Speaking of which, an original show of some kind is in the works with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett’s production company dumbdumb to be delivered to the Elite monthly subscriber base. Also, in fairly predictable fashion, you can get your hands on a slew of MW3 accessories, like keyboards and mice, headphones, “gaming glasses”, and even an MW3 iPhone case. Then, and this is a bit bizarre, Jeep launched an official MW3 version of their popular vehicle. And what about a film? Well, rumors have been kicked around for a few years, but nothing has ever been set in stone. If you want a sense of what a Call of Duty movie might look like though, check out the trailer for the upcoming Act of Valor, which shows real Navy SEALS using actual tactics in hypothetical missions.

The future of the Call of Duty franchise looks very bright (image courtesy of Ubergizmo).

What’s amazing is that as big as the Call of Duty franchise is, it is still the little brother to other game franchises, like Nintendo’s Mario, which dominates them all with 31 video games selling over one million copies since 1995 and a collective total of over 260 million of the core games sold. Then there’s Pokémon which has had a strong market beyond the video games from collective card game and TV series. Other game franchises on par with Call of Duty include Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, and Madden NFL. And none of these game franchises are ready to stop, especially in light of the recent motion sensing technology like Kinect, the market-disrupting second screen of the Wii U, and other innovations to come in the next generation of game consoles that will continue to add new spins on game formulas that work. And what about the most recent addition, Angry Birds, with its pillows, iPhone cases, board games, and now a movie is in the works.

With the overwhelming popularity of first-person shooters, it would be all too easy to label MW3 as a ‘cash cow’. Though the metacritic user score of 3.2 reflects player criticisms that MW3 isn’t that big of a step from last year’s Black Ops, arguments fall flat in the face of record-breaking numbers, much in the same way that it does when people pan Avatar. What is clear is that the age of video games is far from over. Now that a video game has advanced to the top of the fastest-to-$1-billion chart, the ball is in the film industry’s court to find out how elite MW3 really and whether it can pwn like FPS Doug (courtesy PurePwnage):

[Media: Call of Duty, Economist, PurePwnage, Ubergizme, YouTube]

[Sources: Activision, Economist, PwC, Reuters]

The young philosopher also has an eye for finding mind-blowing visuals to help express the indescribable impact of accelerating technology. His upcoming film, Turning Into Gods, will interview the luminaries of today about the extreme possibilities of tomorrow. The documentary is still under production. In the meantime, working with media group NotThisBody, Silva has created several videos that explore the ideas of techno-optimism through wonder and joy rather than cold numbers and graphs. Singularity Hub asked Silva to expound upon his unique approach to discussing The Singularity, and share some of his recent work.

Singularity Hub: You’ve been very busy this past year. Please give us an update on your Turning Into Gods documentary and other projects you’ve developed.

Jason Silva: It has been a whirlwind- the original concept trailer for Turning Into Gods was meant as an invitation to look at the future in a new way, and a means of fishing for collaborators. I wanted to offer a fresh vision fueled by passion, a new framing and context within which to explore the new ‘adjacent possible’ unleashed by exponentially emerging technologies. The result has exceeded expectations: I’ve recently partnered with an Oscar nominated producer to see the project to completion, I’ve spoken at the Singularity Summit, and I’ve had the trailer featured in Gizmodo, Vanity Fair, NextNature.net, FORBES and many other outlets.

I’ve also launched a series of short videos, in collaboration with Marija Coneva of NotThisBody. exploring the co-evolution of humans and technology. These videos are ‘ecstatic meditations’, meant to offer audiences multiple points of entry into these ideas. There’s no need to wait until I finish the feature doc, because the conversation is meant to be ongoing. The short videos are like shots of ‘philosophical espresso’, or PSA’s to infect you with AWE. They are non-commercial labors of love meant to be shared, and they seem to be resonating.

The latest installment, The Beginning of Infinity, inspired by David Deutsch’s book of the same name, was shown to rousing applause at The Economist Magazine’s World in 2012 Ideas Festival, as well as at the Singularity Summit in NYC. Chris Anderson, owner and curator of the TED Conference, called the video “stunning”, Smart Planet wrote about it, and I’ve been invited to speak at the prestigious DLD Digital Life Design Conference in Munich. I’m also speaking at Lucid NYC in January.

[Editor's Note: Actually, the newest video from NotThisBody and Silva was just released and made the front page of Vimeo. Here it is:]

SH: Everyone has their own definition of The Singularity. To you, what is The Singularity, and what is it not?

JS: The Singularity is an epic metaphor: we all know the story, it’s a way to describe an event horizon, just within our reach, where technological progress will be so profound and our human/technology symbiosis so deep, that by all accounts it will birth a new chapter in human history, a new epoch in the cosmos.

I find the ideas erotic, profound and intoxicating: exponential technological progress in biotechnology means reprogramming and upgrading our human wetware, much like we upgrade our imacs—It could mean curing cancer, disease, aging, the way we patch software problems.

Nanotechnology means impregnating matter with intelligence. Artificial intelligence means transcending the limitations of our biology… A future where Freeman Dyson predicts a generation of artists composing genomes the way Shakespeare composed verses. Synthetic biology ushers in an era where Kevin Kelly suggested we will transition “from the born to the made”.

The Adjacent Possible is a term I love. First coined by Stuart Kaufman and popularized by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, it is defined as “a sort of shadow future, hovering on the present state of things, a map of all the ways the present can re-invent itself.” This idea of probing the edges of possibility, (particularly when incorporating the realities of exponential growth curves manifested in technological progress), means the present can re-invent itself in dazzling new ways.

When a 60 million dollar supercomputer half a building in size becomes an iPhone in 40 years (and actually the iPhone is a thousand times more powerful) you can extrapolate where this momentum and progress is headed in the next 5, 10, or 20 years. Molecular sized devices interacting with our biological neurons and cells, virtual reality environments where we can render our dreams into being and build worlds where we can soar.

But here’s the thing: we’ve been doing this all along. We bring our imagining into existence. We come up with virtual models in our heads—delightful future possibilities—and then we pull the present forward to meet those possibilities. If you could look at human progress over time as if through a timelapse film, you would see our dreams spilling over from our minds onto the world.

What has changed is the buffer time between what we imagine and what we create. Our greater tools means an ever shrinking lag time between dream and creation until we reach a crescendo, a rousing symphonic climax, a time when we can architect worlds into being like the lucid dreams in the film INCEPTION in REAL TIME!

SH: How did you become interested in advancing technologies and the promises of techno-optimism?

JS: Because technology has always improved the human condition. It seems counter-intuitive but I would point people to Matt Ridley’s TED talk, “when ideas have sex”, or Steven Pinker’s Myth of Violence, or the website Gapminder.com chronicling human progress. Contrary to popular belief: things are getting better. X Prize founder Peter Diamandis has written a new book with Steven Kotler all about this. Its called ABUNDANCE: Why the future will be better than you think, and I encourage everyone to read it.

SH: There are many other futurists and techno-optimists out there, what do you hope to add to the discussion through your work?

JS: I have many heroes: Ray Kurzweil, Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand and more. These maverick men have worked hard to epiphanize minds and expand horizons. I just want a seat at the table. My opinion is that certain ideas are too big to fit inside their usual academic packaging. You need to give people other points of entry, other ways to engage with these ideas. Where is the ecstatic poet in all this? Who is talking about the visceral/existential implications of this radical progress? We need to make room for these philosophical ruminations, spaces to think out loud . I am confident that I am bringing a spirited and artful voice to the discussion. I love it when ideas have sex. I’m just trying to contribute to this space by sprinkling the ideas with aesthetic aphrodisiacs.

SH: Is there a single message that you want your audience to receive?

JS: I’d like people to understand the importance of delivery, aesthetics and presentation. The biggest, greatest ideas in the world still compete in ‘the marketplace of ideas’. We need to influence public discourse if we are to make a dent in the cosmos. I’d love people to connect, exchange, think about big ideas. I want to get people excited about awe. I want to make content that induces rapturous bliss. There’s no better way to feel.

SH: From the “Rapture of the Nerds” to “Robo-pocalypse”, the mainstream conceptions of what advancing technology bodes for the future tend to be either dismissive or dystopian. Can techno-optimism and The Singularity make it in the mainstream?

JS: I think the singularity is like a symphony playing on a cosmic scale- its the ultimate triumph of intelligence over entropy, complexity over disorder and low organization. Its Beethoven’s 5th symphony choreographed across galaxies and throughout eons. Its the greatest dream we have ever dreamed, set to music and arousing goosebumps. As the end of the documentary Flight From Death states, “Life exists in individual moments and it is up to us to make those moments vast, interconnected and grand, to make a masterpiece out of life, one that we would willingly live again and again, for all of eternity. This is what we can strive for.”

Why aim for anything less?

For more of Jason Silva and his awe-centric approach to the future, check out these two recent interviews with Critical Thought TV and Reason TV. You can also find him on his website, or follow him on Twitter.

[image credit: Jason Silva]
[video credits: Jason Silva, NotThisBody, Reason TV, Critical Thought TV]

Map? Check. Guidebook? Check. M4A1 assault rifle? Check.

I guess it was only a matter of time before someone equipped Google Street View navigators with a gun. Pool Worldwide, a Dutch advertising company, did just that. The M4A1 pointed menacingly at blurry-faced people, cars and buildings. It even made shooting sound effects so you could take out unsuspecting pedestrians on your lunch break.

The website was more of a self-promotion gimmick than an attempt at making a poor man’s Call of Duty. But Google moved in quickly and disarmed the company, citing a terms of service violation and blocking the company’s access to Google Maps. Pool Worldwide, however, might just be thinking mission accomplished. The game was only up from Friday through late Monday night but peak traffic on the site saw about 3,000 visitors per minute. That’s some viral advertising.

I didn’t get to play the game myself, but I suspect it’d be something like racing parked cars. Not that awesome after about 10 minutes when the novelty wears off. But the company’s plan might be taken as a sign of things to come, namely, computer gaming that incorporates the vast maps of Google Maps and Google Earth. Google Earth has a flight simulator feature that they launched a few years back. You can choose between an F-16 jet or a prop plane, and take off and land at runways all over the world. I had fun weaving between the 3D-enabled buildings of downtown Baltimore. GE Flight Simulator is a website that basically expands Google Earth’s tool with a fleet of different aircraft, over 30,000 runways, and a chat feature so you can tell someone: “Meet me at LAX!”

Despite Google’s disapproval of machine guns, it seems to me inevitable that gaming will incorporate Google’s vast database of location imagery. And it doesn’t have to be a first person shooter. What about using it in a Second Life-type game? A virtual world based on the real world. Then you could start using Linden dollars at your neighborhood coffee shop too.

[image credit: Financial Post and SkyNews]
[video credit: SkyNews via YouTube]
image 1: Shoot View
video: Shoot View

Their long delayed quest to kill all humans will just have to wait another day – these robots are taking a tea interval. This holiday season Singularity Hub wants to spend a brief moment pointing out one of the more delightful technology themed gifts you can find on the web. The “Armed With Technology Tea Infuser” is a cute kitchen utensil that allows you to brew loose leaf tea for the geek you love. Twist the little robot’s antennas to open the tea compartment, swivel its hinged hands to grasp the cup and you’ll be brewing the taste of the Singularity in no time. The Armed With Technology Tea Infuser even comes with a small drying tray for when the tea is done. A fun mixture of the old and new, this steeping robot is a great addition to anyone’s holiday haul. Now you can own your own little taste of our growing robot culture. Available at ModCloth ($15), Amazon ($10) and Greenfeet ($9).

Have more ideas for technology themed-gifts? Share them with us in the comments below. If we like your suggestion enough we may just give it a post of its own.

[images via ModCloth, Amazon and Greenfeet]

The demonstration, called “Flight Assembled Architecture“, will take place at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France. Fifty quadcopters will take to the air simultaneously and work together to position all of the 1,500 prefabricated foam blocks. When it is completed the tower will stand 6 meters tall (19.7 feet) and 3.5 meters wide (11.5 feet). That’s a significant chunk of the 10 x 10 x 10 meter airspace that the 50 quadcopters get to work in. Custom built electronics and onboard sensors enable the precise control needed to dance together so dangerously close. The robots can be pre-programmed for flight paths that might include arcs and spirals, and a fleet management program takes over when the vehicles fly too close to avoid collisions. The program also automates take-offs and landings. A state-of-the-art motion capture system will track the robots simultaneously at a rate of 370 frames per second with millimeter accuracy. The tracking computer will send flight commands wirelessly from a control room nearby.

The coordination and precision required to build the tower with 50 quadcopters accident free will be challenging. But watch them in action, dancing beautifully through the air in the following video and I think you’ll agree that they’re up to the task.

The tower was conceived by Swiss architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler at ETH Zurich and robotics engineer Raffaello D’Andrea from Italy. Gramazio and Kohler’s research at the university explores the new area of additive digital fabrication. You can think of their robots as large scale 3D printers, building layer by layer. To harness the power of digital tools in architecture design and construction, the team is formulating algorithms that intertwines both structural logic and aesthetics. They call it “informed” architecture.

The tower is just the latest of Gramazio and Kohler’s digital constructions. In 2008, R-O-B, their large, one-armed robot built a 100-meter, meandering wall at the “Explorations” architectural exhibit in Venice. Building the sculpture, called “Structural Oscillations,” is not as simple as it might seem. Being placed in the exhibition’s pavilion, the wall – essentially a stack of unmortared bricks – had to not topple over and crush attendees as they walked past it. A straight wall would have been dangerously unstable, and the oscillating curvatures added structural support. But the robot had to decide just how curved each segment would be. Segments varied both in amount of curvature and brick rotation. Places where the wall straightened would lean, but the swing of the entire wall would pull taut and compensate with increased stability. I mention these architectural elements only to highlight the complexity of the robot’s task. And it accomplished its task, in the end, placing 14,961 individually rotated bricks with its algorithms.

"Structural Oscillations" at the Explorations exhibit in Venice, Italy.

The quadcopters will work the same way, but in addition to adjusting to the placement of the blocks, they’ll have to adjust to each other as well. D’Andrea, a professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich, brings expertise in autonomous systems to the team. With an emphasis on adaptation and learning, he hopes to change our perception of architecture from a standardized process to a dynamic one. He developed the Flying Machine Arena, the “controlled sandbox” for mobile robots that the quadcopters performed in in the video. D’Andrea is also the co-founder of Kiva Systems, the warehouse robots that fetch merchandise instead of people.

If you happen to be in the Orléans area and want to check out the exhibition, it will begin December 2nd and run to February 19 of 2012.

Although the team strives to push the boundaries of automated architecture, at the moment their creations are more like works of art. No doubt it will be quite some time before humans begin handing over their mortar shovels and bandsaws to the robots. Right now the emphasis on algorithm-driven materialization is more philosophical than practical. But letting computers take over the creative process can yield some truly stunning creations. Who knows what robots might build in the future by following their structurally sound yet unpredictable algorithms? It could be said that Gaudi followed a similar rule.

[image credits: Dezeen]
[video credits: FedeAugu via YouTube]
images: Flight Assisted Architecture
video: Quadcopter

Official jacket for the upcoming DVD and Blu-Ray release.

Good news for all you Hatsune Miku fans: the virtual diva is ready for you to enjoy in high definition. Ever since her US debut in Los Angeles this past summer, bootleg copies of her concert have been appearing and quickly shut down on YouTube and other video sites. Luckily, Sega is now sharing some wonderful HD footage of the event that you don’t want to miss. Watch the official video below, along with some other sanctioned HD press recordings that give you a good look at the ‘holographic’ pop star. They’re followed by some other great Hatsune HD stuff you’ll want to check out. Seeing Miku in high def isn’t as cool as actually being there in person, but it’s still pretty great, and it’s about to get better. The official DVD (¥6300 or ~$82) and Blu-Ray (¥7350 or ~$97) of the concert will drop on December 21st of this year. Let the Miku madness commence!

The official SEGA coverage of “Mikunopolis” at the 2011 Anime Expo in LA this year is top notch:

Our next video gives you a much better idea of what it was like to watch the event from the press booth. The following 15 minute clip includes most of the first six songs performed at the concert:

Finally, here’s Hatsune Miku performing “Electric Angel”, a fan favorite:

While viciously defensive of their intellectual property, SEGA is becoming more gracious with sharing video of Hatsune Miku for free. The official YouTube channel is slowly releasing more and more great footage from Miku’s concert in full HD. There’s too many wonderful videos for me to embed them all, but here’s one to show you the quality:

On a non-concert note, Hatsune Miku became the official spokespersons for the 2011 Toyota Corolla. As part of that marketing campaign, she appeared in several ad spots. You can watch them individually, or see them in the compilation video below. Putting virtual characters into commercials is far from new (in fact, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book), but I think it’s really cool that Miku now has enough star attraction to be the face of a major line of cars. That’s Mickey Mouse territory:

For a fake sixteen year old, Hatsune Miku certainly gets around. She’s sold out concerts in Tokyo and Los Angeles, starred in her own series of popular video games, and become the spokesperson for Toyota. As her fame grows, it’s hard to separate out how much is due to the character of Miku, and how much stems from the arrival of a new wave of user-friendly technology. Miku is just one of several artificial singing voices produced by Crypton Future Media using Yamaha’s Vocaloid software. During the LA concert, the other characters (Ren & Lin, and Luka) certainly got their own roaring response from the fans. Could Crypton (and SEGA) create as many new pop divas as they like?

Having seen her ‘in person’, and watching the joy on her fans’ faces when she rose onto the stage, I’m starting to think there’s something unique about Hatsune Miku. Not in her voice or ‘holographic’ performances – those technologies can be replicated and will undoubtedly be replaced as engineers improve upon the concepts. No, Miku’s special simply because her fans have decided she’s special – maybe because she’s the first real pop star of her kind, maybe just on a whim. But while you don’t see them in the HD concert videos, there are thousands upon thousands of fans that write songs for Miku and share that seemingly endless content with each other to their mutual delight. It’s that self-propelling user base for the Hatsune Miku avatar that really makes this diva something special. As long as those fans love making, sharing, and listening to their own music sung by a pretty face, this trend is only going to get bigger. So all you human idols out there better prepare yourselves: Hatsune Miku can ride the waves of popularity as well as any flesh and blood singer, and it looks like her tide is rising. At least for the foreseeable future.

After all, life for a pop star is never certain…even if you’re synthetic.

[image credit: SEGA]
[video credits: SEGA, Davidvlila123789, FastMatt, Toyota]

Artwork.

And the Yahoo Roomba Art Group are putting up some seriously cool pics on flickr. Who would have thought you can create striking works of art and clean the living room floor at the same time? Technology opens yet another door to new possibilities. If you feel so inclined and have a Roomba, dim the lights, fix an LED, and watch the brush strokes appear on the canvas. I don’t know if the robots are inspired by beautiful artwork, but looking at these pictures, it’s hard for us humans to not be.

credit: mikebala

credit: reconscious

credit: 3rdyeyepro

credit: bartlec

credit: reconscious

The artists ready to work their magic.

credit: IBRoomba

Who needs LEDs? This one’s going old school!

credit: jurvetson

[image credits: Roomba Art Pool]

Instances of video surveillance have increased in recent years. Scotland Yard is using CCTV footage in their ongoing prosecutions after the London riots, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City has urged the use of more such cameras, and various government organizations are looking to increase their effectiveness. Can monitoring street corners really cut down crime, or are they just new ways of handing out traffic and parking tickets? Even outside of security surveillance, the growing presence of cameras among the general public is fraught with cautionary tales about privacy. Who can forget the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi after being secretly recorded by his roommate? The possibilities for such misuse only grow as more fantastic and surreptitious kinds of cameras are developed for public use. Balanced against all these privacy concerns is the overwhelming popularity (and enjoyment) of recording and publishing videos to the social network. Some even want to share everything they see, 24/7. With all the data to sift through, and the weight of the issues, it’s helpful to have this following infographic to help us make sense of things. Read it, enjoy it, and share it. It’s a great way to get the conversation started.

[Graphic created by Mezzmer Eyeglasses]

Case in point: a new 200-inch, HD screen on which images shift through 57 different viewing angles to give the appearance of 3D – without the need for glasses. The trick behind the glasses-free 3D is an array of 57 projectors behind the screen, each projecting the same image at a slightly different angle. As awesome as the images are, the screen is not quite practical. You’ll need an extra room for the array and a forklift to move its 500 kg.

More practical is the 55ZL2 glasses-free 3D TV from Toshiba that will be launching this Christmas in Europe. When it does it’ll be the first of its kind available to the public. Powered by CEVO-ENGINE, the 7 core processing unit that uses special picture-algorithms to turn 2D pictures into 3D.

“Practical,” except for the reported price tag of $11,676.

But who needs a CEVO-ENGINE when you’ve got 500 kilograms worth of projectors? Developed by Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications (NICT) and JVC Kenwood, the 3D effect is currently limited to 13 degrees of viewing range. A condenser lens focuses the image onto the screen, and a special diffuser film makes the transitions between the different angles smooth. Take a look in the video below, and start wishing you had one.

[image credits: technabob and NICT]
[video credit: DigInfoTV via YouTube]
image 1: sunflower
image 2: shark
video: DigInfoTV

3D printing and children - a perfect match. (artist rendering)

Origo may be the last toy you ever have to buy for your child. The prototype 3D printer under development by Artur Tchoukanov and Joris Peels allows children aged ten and up to design figurines and shapes on a computer, and then print them out to play with. Instead of buying your children more toys, let them make their own. Check out the incredible idea behind Origo in the concept video below.

I recently had a chance to correspond with Peels. He tells me that Origo is talking with angel investors and hopefully 18 months from launch.  Though Tchoukanov and Peels have a lot of work ahead of them if they want to make Origo a reality, the promise of this concept makes so much sense that it warrants serious attention. Early testing at TEDxKids in Brussels suggests that children are dying to print their own stuff. Where was 3D printing when I was kid, huh?

Origo’s concept video is very basic, but it gives you a good idea of what Tchoukanov and Peels hope to accomplish. A simple interface allows children to digitally design a shape, and then the Origo printer creates it in an hour or so (depends a lot on size and complexity). A machine that takes your dreams and turns them into real world objects – what child wouldn’t want this thing?

Origo is still in the prototype phase, but its creators have openly discussed some of the ultimate specs on their Twitter feed and Facebook page, as well as on their main site. We should expect the 3D printer to have a USB port, wireless connectivity, a price around $800, and it will use 3Dtin as its design software. Peels tells me that the printer will be able to produce objects about the size of a “large mug or medium jar.” Depending on complexity, Origo should be able to give kids a small object (like a ring) in a manner of minutes, but larger objects (like a detailed baseball) could take a few hours.  Material costs for 3D printing are high (say $40 to $400 a kilo for plastic!) but Peels really wants to bring this down to something very reasonable. He couldn’t go into details as to how Origo will accomplish this, but he was confident it could be done. They are also looking at including a “recycling pod” with Origo so that old objects can be broken down and reused to print new ones. Peels hopes that cheaper materials will lead to Origo being adopted by a large number of households, disrupting both the toy industry and the 3D printing industry in one blow. They aim to sell directly from their website and through several partnered retailers.

The prototype for Origo seen here was itself printed on a 3D printer. Cool, huh? The company is being rather tight-lipped about specs, but the target price is $800.

Now, clearly some of what Peels and Tchoukanov hope to accomplish has been done before to different degrees. Desktop 3D printers are already here, and small companies are already making their impact. One of my favorite 3D printers is from MakerBot. In fact, their open source printers have been so successful that they’ve garnered the startup $10 million in funding. So what makes Origo different? Well, the cheapest you’ll get a MakerBot printer is around $1300, and that involves you doing most of the assembly. Origo will come completely ready to go for $800, and is dedicated to being very kid/home friendly: quiet, non-toxic, child-safe, etc. Now, with just a prototype, it’s not clear on how much of their promises Origo will be able to deliver on. But even a partial success for Origo may allow them to claim this niche in the 3D market easily. For while kids can use MakerBot and other 3D printers currently on the market, these products simply aren’t designed with children in mind.

Origo will be. I think one of the cornerstones of Origo’s possible success is Tchoukanov and Peels’ choice to leverage 3Dtin. For those who haven’t used the program before, it’s a very simple interface that allows you to create 3D shapes out of virtual blocks. Most 3D software out there is really hard to learn and mysterious to the uninitiated. Not so with 3Dtin. With minimal instruction (there are some great online tutorials) you can start designing almost anything you can imagine out of the primary colored virtual blocks. (Peels tells me that simple rules like “don’t make anything thinner than two blocks” keep kids from designing things that won’t print well.) 3Dtin then exports the object you created into one of several commonly used 3D file formats. It’s not the most versatile 3D design software out there, but it certainly is one of the easiest to use. I’d tell you to go and try 3Dtin right now, but then you would never come back to read the rest of this article. It’s that fun and addictive to play with.

Ah, yeah. A child name Ritik designed his own eponymous shades during the TEDxKids event Peels organized.

That’s something that the Origo team knows well. During the latest TEDxKids event in Brussels, Peels and a few colleagues taught 56 ten years olds how to use 3Dtin, and then helped them print out what they had created in the virtual interface. The results where dozens of cool objects, and a bunch of really excited children. Now, the 3D printers used were commercial grade, not the Origo prototype, but this little experiment proved the Origo equation will work. Easy design interface + 3D printing = excited and engaged children creating their own fun.

Peels also revealed to me that what children want from 3D printing may be counter-intuitive. Some of the most desired objects kids want to create are headphones, customized gifts, display objects, and accessories. Peels stressed that children are sold “toys” but what they create is more innovative and useful than mere playthings. It’s possible that training children on a platform like Origo may help create a generation that is more interested in custom building their small goods than purchasing them. Certainly Peels thinks that 3D printing is a gateway to a better mode of consuming and a technology we should get children interested in now:

“If you make what you want exactly as you want it to be, those things will be of higher value to you than the mass produced crap that dominates our world. With 3D printing you can make something that fits your body precisely, or a gift that fits the occasion precisely. You can make something for one person, you. This is where the true promise of 3D printing lies, to let us escape mass production and make the things that we really want. 3D printing closes the resolution gap between the imagination and reality. It is a wish fulfillment technology. It is our hope that by closing the gap between kids’ imaginations and the things they can make they will partially lose interest in mass produced items and they will help push back mass production.”
—Joris Peels, October 2011

Tchoukanov and Peels are still very early in their journey to bring Origo to life, but they have some firm credentials that may help get them there. Tchoukanov started Origo as his master’s thesis at the prestigious Umea Institute of Design in Sweden, and interned at Shapeways (a 3D printing company we’ve covered before). Meanwhile, Peels was the Commmunity Manager of both i.materialise (a 3D printing service) and Shapeways. They aren’t quite superstars of the 3D printing world, but they do know a lot about how it works. And who knows, maybe Origo will make them superstars.

I’m certainly rooting for Origo, and it would be a shame if they don’t get off the ground in the next 18 months or so. There are many hurdles, not the least of which is taking a prototype and turning it into a platform that only costs $800, but that does much of what devices twice its cost can do. That’s going to be difficult. If I’m being honest, it may be impossible. But these guys are very committed, smart, dedicated to their vision, and have a working prototype. You really can’t ask for more than that.

Of course, whether or not Origo succeeds, the greater shame would be if their idea didn’t get the attention it deserves. Children and simplified 3D printing are an awesome combination. I hope that MakerBot, Stratasys, Objet and other 3D printing companies are looking at this concept and seeing the possibilities. A desktop 3D printer that was stripped down to fit a price tag less than $1000 and that came with a simplified design suite would be a killer product. Good luck to Origo in making that dream come true, but kudos to anyone that can make it happen.

…and a billion points to anyone who sends such a product back in time to my 10 year old self. I would have given up Legos for a 3D printer like this! (<—I can think of no greater praise.)

Here it is, the prototype for Origo. Who knows, in a few years it just might be a household name. Good luck, guys!

[image credits: Origo]
[video credit: Umea Institute of Design]
[source: Origo, Joris Peels via email]

An Electric Sheep created by Phssthpok

“Dr. Chandra, will I dream?”
“I don’t know.”

If Hal was somehow able to dream after Dr. Chandra shut it down in Arthur C. Clarke’s “2010,” the results may have looked something like Electric Sheep. Not at all resembling the sheep we might conjure as we fall asleep, these beautiful digital images spring to life when a computer drifts off to its screensaver slumber. But they’re more than just a randomized graphics program. Each Electric Sheep is the collective creation of thousands of computers around the world. The Electric Sheep shown in the pictures and videos below are a striking artistic demonstration of the creative powers of the Internet and open source sharing. By voting on sheep they find visually appealing, humans cause these virtual creatures to compete, procreate and evolve. What strange and beautiful results may arise as these visual creations become ever better examples of digital lifeforms?

The sheep are the creation of Scott Draves, and they’re the conceptual descendants of one of Draves’ earlier creations called Flames. While getting his PhD in computer science at Carnegie Melon he wrote an graphics algorithm to create fractal patterns by treating each pixel as a variable and by introducing parameters that numbered in the thousands. The original flames were created using plugins for Adobe Photoshop and AfterEffects. He published the algorithm online and, well, the Flames spread. Today the Flame algorithm is installed on millions of computers worldwide.

created by user cqfd93

But the Flames were static and Draves wanted to animate them. Inspired by the then new SETI@home project that used the Internet to tap the computing power of millions of idle home computers, Draves utilized a similar approach to be able to carry out the demanding computations required to animate his Flames.

As the number of people who downloaded the free screensaver grew, so did the number of frames able to be rendered on Draves’ server. The iterative algorithm was able to take the newly added pixel data and rearrange them in new ways, with new colors and motions. And that’s how Electronic Sheep were born.

created by user Bananablob

A GUI app called Apophysis that makes it easier for users to create sheep replaced the original Flame plugins. Now thousands of sheep are being created by thousands of people with an artistic bent. The current version gives each sheep about ten seconds of life before another sheep begins swirling in its place. If you think of the sheep as virtual lifeforms – as Draves does – you can – also like Draves – think of each sheep’s algorithm as its genetic code. As he wrote for the computer graphics interest group SIGGRAPH, new animations “have a chance to contribute their genes to the reproductive system of the Electric Sheep, which was already based on Darwinian evolution with mutation and crossover.”

created by user brood

Here’s the first of several videos to give you a look at what these beautiful “lifeforms” look like.

But every good Darwinian system needs a ‘Survival of The Fittest’ force. That’s where the users come in. As users watch the sheep morph on their computer screen they can vote for the ones they like and vote down the ones they don’t. In this example of art imitating life, the fittest sheep – that is, the most popular ones – get to “mate” and contribute their virtual DNA to produce unique offspring. Draves calls it a “process of death and rebirth.” You can download the sheep program here to try your hand at some artificial natural selection.

Electric Sheep are not merely a very ingenious and labor-intensive way to make pretty screensavers, they’re part of Draves’ open source philosophy. “I think we as a society should support free information to a much greater extent than we do,” he said in an interview with The Creators Project. “My artwork is a manifestation of this philosophy.”

Creative Commons, the online affiliate that provides licensing to open share software including Electric Sheep, share Draves’ philosophy. They believe that only through universal access to research, education, and culture can the full power of the Internet be realized. They envision a day when the Internet is used to harness the creative input of thousands or millions of users to not only make better sheep, but improve our lives through an evolutionary honing of knowledge.

But just as the products of biological evolution aren’t always the most straightforward solutions (see David Linden’s “The Accidental Mind” for a healthy dose of humility about our brains’ hodgepodge architecture), Draves is often not a big fan of what his sheep-creating collective breathes life into. What he refers to as the “Las Vegas Effect” lead people to choose sheep that are flashy, have lots of bright colors and move fast. This prompted Draves to sift through the sheep himself and pull out the ones he finds aesthetically pleasing. He’s compiled them into limited edition videos that he sells to help fund the not-yet-profitable Electric Sheep.

The fact that sheep evolve on their own means Draves has satisfied his own impetus to explore whether or not computers can create something new, something greater than the sum of their input. “Genetic code,” “evolution,” “creation”…sounds like Draves just might have a touch of God complex. “That’s right,” he told The Creators Project when asked if he was playing God. “I’ve created a universe and the rules for this universe and then inside it sort of has a population that lives there.” He follows that by admitting he wanted to create virtual life, and that “it’s not clear how successful one can be. …Can computers think? Can a computer be creative?”

And then he starts to get metaphysical for real.

“…is humanity the only possible vehicle for what really amounts to a soul? …some people believe that all material matter follows the rules of physics, and if you can figure out what physics is, a computer can follow the rules and therefore you can simulate life in a computer. So it really becomes a profound question that we are, as a society, really just starting to struggle with.”

Right now, the Electric Sheep are still just screensavers, albeit evolving and unpredictable screensavers. But what limits are there to the kind of reiterative, informatics cross-breeding underlying their generation? What might be produced when the same process is applied to more functional outputs? What if we woke up one morning and our computers were doing things that we didn’t fully understand.

And so on.

How that might play out is as unpredictable as the sheep. Until it happens, I suppose we’re left merely to wonder…and perhaps dream.

[image credits: created by Brother Lewis, Phssthpok, Bananablob, brood, and cqfd93 at electricsheep.org]
[video credits: electric sheep.org via YouTube]
images: electric sheep
video 1: electric sheep 1
video 2: electric sheep 2
video 3: electric sheep 3

A little free advice: When you do go shopping for a daycare (or nursing home) run by robots, don’t tell them they’re not “real people.” They hate that.

[screen capture and video credits: Geico]