Blogbook
Samsung made a batphone. Why? Why not? As the Verge explains: This isn’t the phone we need, it’s the phone we deserve right now-
Just about a week ago, Samsung announced a special edition of the Galaxy S7 Edge. Called the Galaxy S7 Edge Injustice Edition, the phone is meant to commemorate the third anniversary of the release of the Injustice: Gods Among Us mobile game. Arbitrary anniversaries aside, the Injustice Edition features a custom color scheme; special, blacked-out Gear VR headset; and special Batman-themed plastic case, all packed into a box capped off with a gold-colored batarang.
Let me be perfectly clear: there is nothing special about the S7 Edge Injustice Edition in terms of hardware features or capabilities. It is the same S7 Edge that’s been on sale for a few months, complete with 5.5-inch, curved Super AMOLED display, 12-megapixel camera, and water-resistant features. The same can be said for the Gear VR headset that comes in the kit: in terms of capabilities, it’s the same Gear VR that’s been available for purchase since last fall.
But the Injustice Edition (which should really just be called the Batman phone, but isn’t) has a blacked-out color scheme with gold highlights and a Batman batarang symbol on the back where the carrier logo usually is. It looks absolutely dope, making the admittedly attractive standard black S7 Edge look pedestrian by comparison.
Google’s AnyPixel is a web friendly way for anyone to make unusual displays. Via FastCoDesign:
To make programming any array of physical switches as easy as displaying something on a web page, Google is releasing a new open-source software and hardware library, called AnyPixel.js. It’s a tool anyone can use to combine any number of individual “pixels” into a larger display, which can then be controlled by a web page.
Wanting to come up with an eye-catching example of what AnyPixel.js can be used for, Google decided to use the new software to create a display for the lobby of its NYC office. It purchased about 6,000 light-up arcade buttons and wired them all together, using AnyPixel.js as a controller. Since each arcade button has a color-changing LED inside it, each “pixel” is capable of displaying any color, but because they’re also buttons, the finished display works like a touch screen—allowing you to tap on any pixel to interact with it.
Sure, the finished display is decidedly low-res (with only 5,880 pixels, Google’s arcade button display has less fidelity than your Apple Watch’s screen). But it’s big and messy and mesmerizing and fun. It recaptures a little bit of the analog charm that more primitive displays (like flipboards) evoke, while giving them 21st-century digital oomph.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKJMlq7Xh8I
Using immersive virtual audio and eye-tracking software, SapientNitro has created an Outcast trailer that makes fans think that they’re being possessed by a demon. Via Adweek:
“We wanted to really get across how scary this show was,” Mike Monello, Campfire chief creative officer, told Adweek. “We really thought about trying to create something that was as scary when your eyes are open as when they are closed to really put you in the mind space of the characters in the show who really can’t escape this horror.”
Outcast, from The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, tells the story of a young man who has been living with a demon for most of his life. As he grows older he befriends a preacher to help him break free from this demon and finally live a normal life. Along the way, he encounters others like him and runs into some scary demon-filled situations, which viewers get a taste of in the immersive trailer experience.
Fans looking to get the full experience can visit PossessionBegins.com, plug in some headphones and turn on their webcams. All they need to do to start the experience is close their eyes and the demons voice kicks in. The eye-tracking software is able to detect when the viewer closes his or her eyes, which triggers the audio portion of the experience. As soon as the viewer opens their eyes, the software senses that as well and begins to play some of the frightening visual clips from the show.
Ken Liu’s amazing short story “Memories of My Mother” has been adapted into the short film “Beautiful Dreamer”. Via Tor:
In 2012, Liu published the flash fiction piece “Memories of My Mother,” which takes less than five minutes to read but is guaranteed to have you misty-eyed in the first sixty seconds in its depiction of a dying mother who uses time dilation to visit her daughter at various points in her lifetime. And now, a production company called The Colony Media has adapted “Memories” as a 26-minute short film, Beautiful Dreamer.
Film Synopsis:
Facing a terminal disease, a mother uses space travel and relativity to stretch her last two years over the lifetime of her baby daughter, visiting for only one night every seven years. Mother and daughter must negotiate to build a relationship despite the longing and estrangement that mark the moments they are able to share.
You can follow the film on its Facebook page. Also, if you haven’t read Ken Liu’s work before, now’s the time! His short story collection Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is out in stores, which includes the titular short story “Paper Menagerie“, which swept the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXNNcLOS1xM
In Motorola’s new ads, when you break your smart phone, you release emojis into the wild, with hilarious results. Via adweek:
The campaign promotes the brand’s Droid Turbo 2, which is billed as a shatterproof screen:
“As we thought about how to really tell the story of shatterproof in a way that is relevant and meaningful to people, the agency came to us with this idea about the world inside your phone and what happens to all of these emojis that are so prevalent and part of our everyday life,” said Barbara Liss, Motorola’s head of North America marketing. “We thought it was a great way to attract the millennial crowd as well as the older crowd—emojis have really become almost a universal language.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMl-1YN6RZ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Q5SNcwaBs
Users can also contribute social content via the hashtag #ShatteredStories.
Credits
Client: Motorola Mobility
Agency: VML
Country: United States of America
Debbi Vandeven, Global Chief Creative Officer
Mike Wente, Managing Director & Executive Creative Director
Josh McGuire, Group Creative Director
Harsh Kapadia, Creative Director
Raihana Halim, Senior Art Director
Justine Cotter, Senior Copywriter
Kolby Slocum, Executive Producer
Vicky Trinh, Senior Project Manager
Tarini Shrikhande, Senior Planner
Madeline Nies, Content Strategy Director
Chris Furse, Executive Business Director
Ashley Pryor, Account Supervisor
Kelli Lane, Account Director
Via Republik Film Productions, Grandma Lo-fi: The Basement Tapes of Sigrídur Níelsdóttir tells the story of the Icelandic/Danish musician and visual artist. From the video:
At the tender age of 70 she started recording and releasing her own music straight from the living room. Seven years later she had 59 albums to her name with more than 600 songs – an eccentric myriad of catchy compositions mixing in her pets, found toys, kitchen percussion and a Casio keyboard.
Sigríður Níelsdóttir is her name, and before long the Icelandic/Danish musician and visual artist became an adored cult figure in the Icelandic music scene, represented here by her young apprentices Mugison, múm, and Sin Fang of Seabear who pay tribute to the grandma’s irresistibly catchy, yet eccentric pop tunes.
Shot mostly on Super-8 and 16mm, Grandma Lo-fi was created over a period of seven years by three musicians and debuting directors, capturing the most productive period in the life of Sigríður Níelsdóttir. In many ways Sigríður is like a cartoon character. Poetic moves such as taking in broken-winged pigeons that in return sing along to her tunes, or transforming a cream whisk into a helicopter, all call for animated sequences that bridge the obscure space between her exemplary imagination and a delightfully peculiar everyday existence.
Grandma Lo-fi is a cinematic tribute to an amazing musician and to her boundless creativity.The Film is in Danish & Icelandic.
English, Icelandic & Spanish subtitles available.
Wondered what it was like to land a rocket? Here’s an onboard SpaceX rocket video of their most recent landing. Via the Verge:
Hours ago, SpaceX landed the first stage of one of its Falcon 9 rockets. It was the third time in a row that the company has landed one of these rocket boosters on a drone ship at sea, and the fourth overall.
The landings aren’t the only thing SpaceX is getting better at though — just now, the company posted this truly incredible footage of the landing taken from onboard the rocket. At the start, we watch the rocket booster use its metal fins to reposition itself in order to head back to Earth, then we get to see the engines make a controlled burn that slows the rocket’s descent. The footage is sped up, so just moments later, the drone ship appears out of nowhere in the ocean while the rocket touches down.
It’s the kind of media that, in the past, would have taken days for SpaceX to release. And it’s not even the first thing the company released — SpaceX also posted a short snippet of slow-motion footage to Instagram (seen below), and has already started uploading photos of the mission to the company’s Flickr page. Elon Musk’s space company is definitely getting good at sending rockets the size of skyscrapers to space and bringing them back safely, but it’s getting even better at showing off.
And so it should.
This is what riding a cheetah must feel like. The Cincinnati Zoo strapped a GoPro onto their cheetah Savannah’s back. Video shows Savannah running at full speed and at slow motion. Via io9:
Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden officials outfitted one of their cheetahs, Savannah, with a GoPro camera to capture what a cheetah in full run looks like. Zoo officials said putting the harness on Savannah was easier than you would expect, since all the cheetahs are hand-raised from a young age.
“We put it on Savannah and she could really care less,” said Alicia Sampson of the cat ambassador program at the zoo.
If Cincinnati Zoo sounds familiar to you, that’s probably because it came tragically to media attention recently when a child got into the gorilla enclosure and fell into the moat, forcing zookeepers to shoot an endangered gorilla. Via CNN:
Harambe, a 17-year-old, 400-pound gorilla, carried the boy around its habitat for about 10 minutes in what the zoo’s dangerous animal response team considered a life-threatening situation, Cincinnati Zoo Director Thane Maynard said at a press briefing.
After the gorilla was shot with a rifle, the child was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, CNN affiliate WKRC reported.
Whoah. In this LG ad, 2015 U.S. Extreme Rock Climbing medalist Sierra Blair-Coyle scales a skyscraper using two LG Code Zero K94SGN vacuum cleaners worn on her back. Via Adweek:
The building is about 460 feet high and situated in Songdo International Business District, a “smart city” about 40 miles southwest of Seoul, South Korea. It took Blair-Coyle about 30 minutes to get to the top, stopping just once to swap out her vacuums.
While Blair-Coyle is a pro, harnessed by safety ropes, the very logistics of the feat give us vertigo: The suctions have to bear the vacuums’ weight in addition to her own, and Slashgear imagines that she probably had to turn each one off whenever she wanted to lift a pad off the glass. You really need a cool head to make this work.
LG hopes this will draw attention to the technological innovation happening in banal, everyday tools. The thinking makes sense: A demonstration like this is unexpected in a sector that suffers from an almost painful lack of imagination, and it places LG’s Code Zero soundly in the ranks of the extreme demo-purveyors that populate the leisure tech space (we’d like to see Samsung test its fear-fighting VR in a situation like this!).
Ara is no longer a fully upgradeable smart phone, but it’s still one of the coolest concepts to come out of the industry in recent years. As its founder Dave Hakkens explains:
“It basically means the Ara skeleton is a fully equipped phone with things like CPU, antennas, sensors, battery and display. The 6 little blocky modules on the back of the phone are just add-ons like better camera’s, speakers, scanners etc. Things to customise your phone, for fun.
It means your phone still gets obsolete after a while. What if your screen breaks? Well you still need to replace the entire phone. And after a couple of years it gets slow and you need to replace your entire skeleton.
A system like this makes other companies want to compete instead of collaborate. They will build their own modular phone, want to create their own ecosystem with their own sizes and connectors. Making modules not compatible with each other anymore. Which ends up in a lot of different modules. Developers will need to make their hardware work on different platforms. If Google truly wants to make a phone for the entire world, they should collaborate with others and make an open standard owned by the industry. Not one company.”
From Forbes:
This is the unfortunate reality of Ara. It’s an extension to what LG has done with its G5. It’s modular in part, in definition, but not in spirit. As I understood it, one of the core goals of the Ara project was to create a device that acts as a shell from which you create the device you need.