Virtual Augmented Plantlife

1st Ave Machine‘s beautifully rendered augmented plant life in “Sixes Last” (music by Alias) [video]

via all manner of distractions | Toxi

Masaki Fujihata : Field Works

Equipped with a GPS receiver, a wide-angle video camera + microphone, a pocket computer, and an electronic compass, Masaki Fujihata records his walks through sites chosen in terms of the possibility of developing a project there linked specifically with its geography and history. The material is then mapped into a 3-dimensional space using the GPS information to orient the sequence into a Field-works virtual excursion.

via pasta and vinegar

Lightspace DepthCube: 3D Volumetric Display

LightSpace claims its DepthCube is the world’s first solid-state volumetric 3D display capable of 3-dimensional projections without any headgear or moving parts. The display runs on a stack of 20 liquid crystal shutters synchronized with a video projector (50Hz refresh rate) all packed in a TV set box circa 1980.

Non-Invasive Brain-Computer Interface

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI), like the one developed at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, places electrodes in key locations on the user’s scalp to detect nerve activity which is then translated to walking or movement of the virtual character’s hands. The team at the Graz University of Technology have incorporated a fully immersive Virtual Cave for a mind bending walk by thinking. [nature article]

via KurzweilAI

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Here Be Dragons : Emergent Procedural Landscapes

Here Be Dragons, by Todd Furmanski, generates fully procedural landscapes and creatures allowing the user/explorer to wander through an endless world of architecture and terrains generated on the fly. The program runs with FakeSpace‘s Boom3C stereoscopic interface for an immersive experience. [video] [thesis paper]

via wmmna

Virtual World Muggings + Real World Arrest

A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software “bots” to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash. . . There are also reports that some online scammers are using “sweatshopsâ€? in countries such as China and Indonesia in which people monitor teams of bots in order to generate money whilst avoiding bot traps. [NS article]

Timescope : ART+COM

ART+COM‘s Timescope, re presents the past city-scapes of Berlin through a digitally augmented telescope. The “timescope” can be used for a wide range of purposes: it can be set up for use with tourist sites such as the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate or the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church for example, giving visitors the chance to get a closer view of how these locations looked in the past. The “timescope” can also be used for large-scale building projects. In such cases it can be used not only to show how a building project has progressed, but also to show how a building will look in the future. Additionally, it can be used at geological interesting sites, enabling viewers to perceive natural history visually.

via wmmna

NEW-TIES : Counter Strike + The Ultimate Question of Life

The NEW TIES project, an acronym for New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary and Social Learning, is a virtual society (graphics base on Counter Strike’s source engine) of about 1000 agents with complex behavioural programs that may, but probably won’t answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The programming interface is planned to be available to the public, allowing reasearchers to conduct their own experiments on a virtual society. The project’s goal is to evolve an artificial society capable of exploring and understanding its environment through cooperation and interaction. The agents are sufficiently complex and their environment demanding, which enables them to develop a communication system to learn how to cooperate and to adapt.

via NS

Virtual Cities

GeoSim (Israel) offers several services based on their capacity to efficiently digitize cities using proprietary hardware and software. The level of detail is insane! [flythrough 1] [flythrough 2]

via urban cartography | NYT

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Millennium Simulation : The largest model of the Universe

Using more than 10 billion particles and 25 terabytes of stored output, the Virgo consortium has created the largest simulation of the universe’s evolution across 20 million galaxies spanning 2 billion light years. The model, which ran at the Max Planck Society’s Supercomputing Centre in Garching for more than a month, can now compare the simlulated data against observational data to reveal the physical processes underlying the build-up of real galaxies and black holes.

[video (Divx)] dark matter distribution in the universe at the present time based on the Millennium Simulation

via Science Blog

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