Raquo Journal » Magic

Adobe Magic

raquo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:21:46 +0000

Just in case your jaw is ready for the floor again (remember Seam carving?), here are some Adobe technologies that will soon make it into CS5 and other products.

Structural image editing with constraints

See also: more details [pdf], and a similar technology [pdf] for reducing the distortion of wide-angle photographs.

Enhancing video with images

Panoramic video

raquo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:55:31 +0000

OK, Google street view (above) is nice, but what if you could look around… in a video? Turns out you can (and it’s actually old news). A company Immersive Media makes 360˚ cameras and has demos online: whales, ski, roller coaster. To look around in a video, click and drag the mouse inside the flash player. (For best experience open only one video at a time and wait for it to load fully before playing it.)

A year of OpenStreetMap edits

raquo — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:49:04 +0000

OpenStreetMap is a free world map that anyone can edit (like Wikipedia). The video below shows a year of people adding and editing roads and highways all over the world. Sometimes some country’s network lights up at once when a bulk of data is added.

via FlowingData

Soda can synchronization

raquo — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:57:30 +0000

Physics rules. Via SvN.

Big Dog rules

raquo — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:06:44 +0000

Caution: weird sound in the video

This robot, dubbed BigDog, was developed by Boston Dynamics. It’s main feature is the ability to walk through rough terrain the way animals and humans walk (controlled freefall i’d call it), as opposed to moving limbs simply at preprogrammed trajectories. DARPA invested $10M in its development for military use. I doubt these will be sold to general public anytime soon, but keep in mind — its max. payload is 340 pounds so you could potentionally ride it like a horse with a remote in your hands :)

Boston Dynamics also makes a number of other robots designed for rough terrain, including RHex, featured in the video below:

Betagel

raquo — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:32:54 +0000

Japanese guys at Geltec invented betagel. On the video, they throw an egg from the roof of a 22 meter building (that would be about 7 floors) on a 0.02-meter thick layer of betagel (that’s less than an inch — thiner than MacBooks!) (Update Feb 2008 — OK, Macbook Air wins here). As you’ve probably guessed, the egg does not break (although it is likely to have been internally damaged). Remember that famous MBA problem?

Technology is for solving problems.

Content-aware image resizing

raquo — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 15:31:39 +0000

Brady Forrest points us to a video demonstrating content-aware image resizing. Basically, it allows you to resize an image without scaling or cropping it, beautifully cutting out unimportant stuff (automatically!) without usual scaling distortions or dumb cropping. Just watch the video — 4.5 minutes and it’s stunning.