As the Make post says, this 3D-printable model of Captain Picard’s teacup would be a good benchmark for the nascent fabrication technology (the image on the right is a photo of the original Star Trek prop, which was just an off-the-shelf Bodum teacup). That it could be seen as a sly progression from the famous Utah teapot I think makes it an especially worthy benchmark!
Obligatory: “Tea! Earl Grey. Hot.”
The Language Log on how science fiction often misses the mark with predictions of technology (the why is up for debate, of course):
Less than 50 years ago, this is what the future of data visualization looked like — H. Beam Piper, “Naudsonce”, Analog 1962:
She had been using a visibilizing analyzer; in it, a sound was broken by a set of filters into frequency-groups, translated into light from dull red to violet paling into pure white. It photographed the light-pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, and then made a print-copy and projected the film in slow motion on a screen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, “Fwoonk.” An instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors and lengths was projected on the screen.This is in a future world with anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel.
The comments that follow are a great mix of discussion about science fiction writing (why do the galactic scientists in Asimov’s Foundation rely on slide rules?) and 1960s display technology limitations (vector vs. raster, who will win?). I like this site.
GelSight, a high-resolution, portable 3D imaging system from researchers at MIT, basically what looks like a small piece of translucent rubber injected with metal flakes. Watch the video to see some of the microscopic scans they’re able to get using this. I love non-showy SIGGRAPH tech demos like this one.
(Via ACM TechNews)
![From a post titled The Art of Nomography on Dead Reckonings (a blog dedicated to forgotten-but-beautiful mathematical systems! I’d better subscribe to this one…) :
Nomography, truly a forgotten art, is the graphical representation of mathematical relationships or laws (the Greek word for law is nomos). These graphs are variously called nomograms (the term used here), nomographs, alignment charts, and abacs. This area of practical and theoretical mathematics was invented in 1880 by Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938) and used extensively for many years to provide engineers with fast graphical calculations of complicated formulas to a practical precision.
Along with the mathematics involved, a great deal of ingenuity went into the design of these nomograms to increase their utility as well as their precision. Many books were written on nomography and then driven out of print with the spread of computers and calculators, and it can be difficult to find these books today even in libraries. Every once in a while a nomogram appears in a modern setting, and it seems odd and strangely old-fashioned—the multi-faceted Smith Chart for transmission line calculations is still sometimes observed in the wild. The theory of nomograms “draws on every aspect of analytic, descriptive, and projective geometries, the several fields of algebra, and other mathematical fields” [Douglass].
More about nomograms and abacs on Wikipedia.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpufesONEK1qz7as3o1_500.gif)
From a post titled The Art of Nomography on Dead Reckonings (a blog dedicated to forgotten-but-beautiful mathematical systems! I’d better subscribe to this one…) :
Nomography, truly a forgotten art, is the graphical representation of mathematical relationships or laws (the Greek word for law is nomos). These graphs are variously called nomograms (the term used here), nomographs, alignment charts, and abacs. This area of practical and theoretical mathematics was invented in 1880 by Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938) and used extensively for many years to provide engineers with fast graphical calculations of complicated formulas to a practical precision.
Along with the mathematics involved, a great deal of ingenuity went into the design of these nomograms to increase their utility as well as their precision. Many books were written on nomography and then driven out of print with the spread of computers and calculators, and it can be difficult to find these books today even in libraries. Every once in a while a nomogram appears in a modern setting, and it seems odd and strangely old-fashioned—the multi-faceted Smith Chart for transmission line calculations is still sometimes observed in the wild. The theory of nomograms “draws on every aspect of analytic, descriptive, and projective geometries, the several fields of algebra, and other mathematical fields” [Douglass].
More about nomograms and abacs on Wikipedia.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
Via New Scientist, research into an image processing technique designed to mask the actual physical position of the photographer, by creating an interpolated photograph from an artificial vantage point:
The technology was conceived in September 2007, when the Burmese junta began arresting people who had taken photos of the violence meted out by police against pro-democracy protestors, many of whom were monks. “Burmese government agents video-recorded the protests and analysed the footage to identify people with cameras,” says security engineer Shishir Nagaraja of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi, India. By checking the perspective of pictures subsequently published on the internet, the agents worked out who was responsible for them. …
The images can come from more than one source: what’s important is that they are taken at around the same time of a reasonably static scene from different viewing angles. Software then examines the pictures and generates a 3D “depth map” of the scene. Next, the user chooses an arbitrary viewing angle for a photo they want to post online.
Interesting stuff, but lots to contemplate here. Does an artificially-constructed photograph like this carry the same weight as a “straight” digital image? How often is an individual able to round up a multitude of photos taken of the same scene at the same time, without too much action occurring between each shot? What happens if this technique implicates a bystander who happened to be standing in the “new” camera’s position?
A new approach to computer vision object recognition: simulated heat-mapping:
The heat-mapping method works by first breaking an object into a mesh of triangles, the simplest shape that can characterize surfaces, and then calculating the flow of heat over the meshed object. The method does not involve actually tracking heat; it simulates the flow of heat using well-established mathematical principles, Ramani said. …
The method accurately simulates how heat flows on the object while revealing its structure and distinguishing unique points needed for segmentation by computing the “heat mean signature.” Knowing the heat mean signature allows a computer to determine the center of each segment, assign a “weight” to specific segments and then define the overall shape of the object. …
“A histogram is a two-dimensional mapping of a three-dimensional shape,” Ramani said. “So, no matter how a dog bends or twists, it gives you the same signature.”
In other words, recognizing discrete parts (like fingers or facial features) of an object in front of the camera should be much more accurate with this approach than with older techniques like simple edge detection. Uses for real-time recognition are apparent (more accurate Dance Central!), but it seems like this would also be a boon for character animation rigging?
(Via ACM TechNews)
The IBM 2250 graphics display, introduced in 1964. 1024x1024 squares of vector-based line art beamed at you at 40Hz, with a handy light pen cursor. Much more handy than those older displays that just exposed a sheet of photographic film for later processing!
(Via Columbia University, via Ars Technica’s recent quick primer on computer display history)
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Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and pioneer of computer graphics, on the time he and his nascent team were brought in to ILM during the filming of the second Star Wars movie.
From an ACM Queue interview between Catmull and Pat Hanrahan. There are also some good quotes about incubator projects like ARPA providing protection for new ideas, arts education, and the role of artist-scientists in the graphics field.
The man who created the first scanned digital photograph in 1957, Russel Kirsch, pioneer of the pixel, apologizes in the May/July issue of Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Now 81 years old, he offers up a replacement (sorta) for the square pixel he first devised: tessellated 6x6 pixel masks that offer much smoother images with lower overall resolution. The resulting file sizes are slightly larger but the improved visual quality is pretty stunning, as seen in the closeup above. His research was inspired by the ancient 6th Century tile mosaics in Ravenna, Italy.
There are a lot of comments out there complaining that square pixels are more efficient, image and wavelet compression is old news, etc., and that’s true, but if you actually read the article you’ll find that the point isn’t so much the shape, the efficiency, or even the capture/display technology needed, but rather that this could be a good method for reducing the resolution of images somewhat while still retaining visual clarity, important in medical applications and in situations where low-resolution images are still tossed around.
Bonus: the man in the demo photo above is his son, the subject of the first-ever digital photograph!
(Via ScienceNews)
Computational image processing researchers at Northwestern University teamed up with art historians from the Art Institute of Chicago to investigate the colors originally laid down by Matisse while he was working on Bathers by a River:
Researchers at Northwestern University used information about Matisse’s prior works, as well as color information from test samples of the work itself, to help colorize a 1913 black-and-white photo of the work in progress. Matisse began work on Bathers in 1909 and unveiled the painting in 1917.
In this way, they learned what the work looked like midway through its completion. “Matisse tamped down earlier layers of pinks, greens, and blues into a somber palette of mottled grays punctuated with some pinks and greens,” says Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern. That insight helps support research that Matisse began the work as an upbeat pastoral piece but changed it to reflect the graver national mood brought on by World War I.
The Art Institute has up a nice mini-site about Bathers and the accompanying research, including some great overlays on top of the old photos to show the various states the painting went through during the years of its creation.
(Via ACM TechNews)
Augmented Reality without programming in 5 minutes
I can vouch that this works, and it’s pretty straightforward once you manage to grab and build the two or three additional Quartz Composer plugins successfully. I had to fold in a newer version of the ARToolkit libs, and I swapped out the pattern bitmap used to recognize the AR target to match one I already had on hand — the default sample1 and sample2 patterns weren’t working for me for some reason. Apart from that, Quartz Composer’s a lot of fun to use, almost like building eyecandy demos with patch cables and effects pedals, and it’s already on your system if you have Xcode.
(Via Make)
Super Mario Bros. speedrun matchmoved onto a real-life wall. Fun to think about.
(Via Waxy)
L’Artisan Electronique, an openFrameworks-powered “virtual pottery wheel”. Users can deform the cylinder geometry by waving their hand between the lasers and then print a physical copy of their piece using an attached RepRap machine.
(Via Make)
Real-time 3D capture at 60fps using a cheap webcam and simple projected pattern of light points. The structured-light code is open source, looks like a pretty cool project.
(Via Make)
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy lucidly explains display resolution, clearing up arguments about the iPhone 4’s retinal display technology:
Imagine you see a vehicle coming toward you on the highway from miles away. Is it a motorcycle with one headlight, or a car with two? As the vehicle approaches, the light splits into two, and you see it’s the headlights from a car. But when it was miles away, your eye couldn’t tell if it was one light or two. That’s because at that distance your eye couldn’t resolve the two headlights into two distinct sources of light.
The ability to see two sources very close together is called resolution.
DPI issues aside, the name “retinal display” is awfully confusing given that there’s similar terminology already in use for virtual retinal displays…
A collection of this that and the other that has caught my eye lately. Miscellaneous debris.
Captain Kirk making his best Kirk face.
Typeverything.com - Old french sign.
Edward Hopper, Room in New York
Alan Lomax’s dream of a “global jukebox” comes true with 17,000 music tracks being made available for free streaming.
OK Go + Sesame Street = Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
The Iron Giant. The greatest anti-war film ever made. I LOLed a lot. So good.
Friendships among men are often primarily based on shared activities. This can include playing video games, playing musical...
Hyper’s Sally Woellner commends the game for its “distinguished octopi”.
Saul Steinberg’s Italian Years (1933-1941)
The aesthetic persona of Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), who became one of America’s most beloved...
