Drone selfies

jkottke: For the past couple of months, Amit Gupta has been playing around with taking moving self-portraits with a camera mounted on a drone. Here’s an early effort. This past weekend, Amit’s efforts crossed over into the realm of art. This is beautiful: In the comments at Vimeo, Alex Dao dubbed this type of photograph […]

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love-3000:

prostheticknowledge:

The Sword of Damocles

Early pioneering tech from 1968 is a stereoscopic headmounted display created by Ivan Sutherland, the first Virtual Reality technology:

Computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland models a stereoscopic display he created at Harvard using miniature TV tubes. An early application showed a three-dimensional wire-frame virtual room that users could explore by moving their heads.

I couldn’t locate a demonstration of the wireframe rooms (but if anyone knows … let me know!)

Images above are from the Computer History Museum here and here

Papers written by Ivan Sutherland from 1965 on the subject can be found here and here

〰 Wow, I didn’t know it was that small already! In 1968!

Hail the Godfather

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aeromenthe:

Saw this uncaptioned in my feed and had to investigate. In Murder She Wrote s10e05: “A Virtual Murder”, Angela Lansbury travels to Silicon Valley because a game company wants a script doctor to fix their VR murder mystery before a press presentation. Did you know there was a VR episode of Murder She Wrote? WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME. This possibly wonderful gem of early 90s enthusiasm for VR is on Netflix.

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according to Wilk, the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns.

Leon Neyfakh quoting Daniel Levinson Wilk  in How the elevator transformed America for The Boston Globe. (via blech)
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Microsoft is paying to excavate the landfill where the “worst video game ever made” is buried.      

Microsoft is paying to excavate the landfill where the “worst video game ever made” is buried.      

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wolvensnothere:

zerosociety:

theheadlesshashasheen:

The Boondocks – Known Unknowns.

“So, UnknownBinaries & I recently saw Limitless. Now the film’s animating premise is an old one, and you hear it in nearly every piece of science fiction concerned with human enhancement: we only use ten or fifteen or [insert number] percent of our brain or brain power or potential…or whatever. The science behind this trope isn’t strictly correct, mind you, but it’s not completely false either. It’s hard to talk about the operations of the brain without falling into the heavily loaded language of “efficiency,” “carrying capacity,” “throughput,” “processing power,” etc. The problem with all of that talk is that it’s directly tied to the ideas of production and consumption, which are values that come directly out of the mass-production developments of the techno-industrial revolution—and I don’t just mean the musical style. What I’m saying is these words taint and colour everything we do and every way we talk nowadays, and the reason I bring this up is so we can try to talk about the brain.

So, while we don’t know a lot about the brain, all told (or at least I don’t) one of the few things we know is that an abundance of certain chemicals in it can make it easier for us to think about more things, to make connections between those things, and to generally be better at learning, maintaining attention, and focusing. We can measure these things, if that’s important to you, and so, conversely, we can know that the lack or inhibition of these neurochemicals causes us to be…worse. Stupider. So take that as our starting point and we’ll get going from there.”
–  Wolven on NeedCoffeeeeeeee.

No, wolvensnothere. This is our starting point!

I still haven’t gotten to the part where you tell me whether or not I should waste my time with Limitless today.

Limitless is absolutely worth wasting your time on, today.

What Em Said—with all attendant caveats, as written.

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iamdanw:

natgeofound:

Dummy pilot and seat soar, as engineers test a catapult escape system in Arizona, March 1963.Photograph by Robert Sisson, National Geographic

via Dinosaurs and Space

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