Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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An AR iPhone Simulator for the iPhone
An AR iPhone simulator for the iPhone, with working controls. I can’t put it any better than this anonymous comment from the MAKE post: “Yo Dawg, i heard you like augmented reality, so we put an iphone in your iphone so you can touch while you touch.”
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The University of Nebraska Lincoln‘s Online Cartoon Archive
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is hosting an online collection of U.S. government-produced comic books, with full PDF downloads. Tucked away between the weirder, more off-beat stuff you’ll find some unique work from the likes of Walt Kelly, Hank Ketchum, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and more. Like this special run of Peanuts where Charlie Brown has Sally tested for amblyopia ex anopsia.
(Via Cartoon Brew)
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Face Detection
My camera switches over to portrait-mode whenever it sees a painting or a drawing with a face in it. It stays in AUTO mode otherwise.
According to Popular Mechanics: “a chip inside the camera constantly scans the image in its viewfinder for two eyes, a nose, ears and a chin, making out up to 10 faces at a time before you’ve hit the shutter.”
I decided to test my camera—it’s a Canon Powershot SX120—to see what it decides to regard as a face.
Artist James Gurney tests out his point-and-shoot’s facial recognition chip against works of art and illustration. A mixed bag, but a good reminder that this technology is getting better and cheaper (and subtle) all the time.
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The Fat Lab Crew Put the Markup Back in Markup
GML = Graffiti Markup Language from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
The FAT LAB crew put the markup back in markup language, with their week dedicated to creating new applications and standardizing their existing work around a Graffiti Markup Language, an XML archive format describing tagging and gestural drawing. Rad.
See also: the new DustTag and Fat Tag Deluxe iPhone apps.
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You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
[I]t raises the question of how this particular nonsense word came into wide use at MIT. It seems reasonable to pursue this question, and reasonable that there would be some discernable answer. After all, there’s a whole official document, RFC 3092, explaining the etymology of “foobar.” It could be interesting to know what sort of nonsense word “zork” is, since it’s quite a different thing, with very different resonances, to borrow a “nonsense” term from Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll as opposed to Hugo Ball or Tristan Tzara. “Zork,” of course, doesn’t seem to derive from either humorous English nonsense poetry or Dada; the possibilities for its origins are more complex.
From Post Position’s “A Note on the Word ‘Zork’”, investigating the nonsense term that would in the late 70’s would become synonymous with interactive fiction and the birth of popular computer gaming. Maybe Get Lamp will soon clear up some of this for us.
(Via 5cience)
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The Proprietary 8 Bit Processors That Powered
The proprietary 8-bit processors that powered Atari’s home consoles are being resurrected by the Atari History Museum’s Curt Vendel. He’s rebuilding each chip from the fabrication specification data detailed in the original tape-outs he has in his possession, and hopes to be able to crank out brand new replacement chips (the originals have been unavailable to the enthusiast market for years). This looks to my non-engineer eyes like an impressive feat of reverse engineering and history gathering! If nothing else, one can appreciate the high-res circuit scans he’s posted in the discussion thread.
(Via GameSetWatch)
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From a Flickr Set of Soviet Arcade Game Posters
From a Flickr set of Soviet arcade game posters. The image of the Russian pinball table Ну, погоди! is interesting to look at from a pinball design history perspective, much better looking than this scary clown table (though still very utilitarian)!
(Via GameSetWatch and countless other blogs)
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A Parallel Image
[Video no longer available]
A Parallel Image, an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller in collaboration with Franz Büchinger, consisting of an array of sensors, 2500 wires, and small light bulbs to make an “electronic camera obscura” for lo-fi video transmission.
(Via Make)
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One of the Artists Desires Is to Give an Account
One of the artist’s desires is to give an account of reality and at the same time to protect it against oblivion and death, and this effort is bound to fail; failure is there from the beginning. For example, Giacometti knows that he cannot grasp life: he will do his brother’s bust and his wife’s portrait again and again without ever achieving his aim, but this explicit failure is part of the beauty of his work. Gerhard Richter, quoted in The Claude Glass by Arnaud Maillet, p. 200.
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FluidPaint: an Interactive Digital Painting System using Real Wet Brushes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkl782OqqmA&feature=player_embedded
FluidPaint: An Interactive Digital Painting System using Real Wet Brushes. An experimental project by Tom Van Laerhoven of the Hasselt University Expertise Centre for Digital Media in Belgium. Unlike previous digital painting applications, this one uses actual water (detected by a surface-level IR emitter) to record strokes on the surface and more correctly models the tip of the brush being used, whether rounded or fanned, and it can even simulate a sponge. Looks like it makes some convincing watercolor-like images.
More info: Brush Design for Interactive Painting Applications (PDF)
(Via John Nack at Adobe)