Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Who the heck wouldn’t want one of these? Clearly the guys at AirHogs have been looking at the Japanese sumo robots that have been using vaccume systems to stick to the playing surface (you lose if your pushed out of the ring). This toy uses a suction device to let you drive around smooth surfaces like windows. I see that this is a prime canadate for some sumo ring sucking acton here in the states!
[via GadgetMadness]
Here is a simple and elegant solution for movement in a virtual world. Walking in the sphere while wearing wireless VR gear provides 360 degree freedom of movement. Just the think if your going to be walking around in Second Life.
[via GadgetMadness ]
The VirtuSphere: full body immersion Virtual reality at last
If your like me you grew up reading amazingly illustrated books like ‘Underground‘ so you have a sense of what is under foot when your walking around in your city. For those that might have missed the insight that those books might have brought you, there is the National Geographic’s version for what is under a New York city street (no, not ill favored mobsters!) The scale of underground construction in that place is stunning. Just knowing that when your in a subway there is a maze of pipes and conduits all around you is awe inspiring.
[via Core77 ]
I just finished a little tutorial on how to take stereo photographs while your flying in a plane. It’s a great way to pass the time while your waiting to land plus it give you a wonderful chance to see clouds and mountains in a way that hardly anyone ever thinks of. I have a Flickr set with a few that I’ve taken on my last few flights. Enjoy and remember that there is always fun to be had if you have your camera handy.
Many years ago I was hanging out with some friends of mine when one of them produced some colored pencils and a pair of red/green anaglyph glasses. We then spent a fun filled evening trying to draw things in 3D. Had pretty good results. Anyway, I was bitten by the stereo image bug. Soon after that I bought a 1954 Kodak Stereo camera and stocks to make my own slides. Hundreds and hundreds of images later I now want to scan them into the computer and do more with them. For quite a while I was using Photoshop to align the images and tweak them until they looked good but that was taking hours. Then I happened on a bit of freeware called StereoPhoto Maker. It was exactly what I had been looking for. It allows me to make parallel pairs, cross eye pairs, color anaglyphs and other formats that I never thought I’d ever be able to make. The alignment system is simple to use yet powerful enough to fix just about any image you throw at it. I shoot a lot of stereo pairs using the ‘hip switch’ method (stand with your weight on one foot and take the shot, then while still looking through the viewfinder at the subject tranfer your weight to your other foot and take the second shot) because it saves on the cost of getting film processed. In doing this sometimes the images are not exactly on the right axis and need to me tweaked a bit. StereoPhoto Maker steps right up and hits a home run. I have a set of photos on both my TeamDroid gallery and my Flicker gallery that have been made using this program. You can even add a lower third credit to your images if you want. It’s an amazingly handy program, if your shooting 3D images you should take a look at it.
