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…is a GoPro strapped to a Jedi. Work those lightsaber katas!
Ingenious and entertaining parody of the usual GoPro extreme sports-type videos. Via slashfilm:
As you can see, it starts simple with the Jedi taking on some of the Empire’s least accurate soldiers, but then he ends up facing some speeder bikes, a TIE Fighter and an AT-AT, all before some X-Wings and the Millennium Falcon come through to save the day.
While it’s cool to see this play out in live-action video format, with some decent special effects too, I can’t help but think that this Jedi is on the verge of turning to the dark side. Not only is he recording his encounters with the Empire (for whose enjoyment?), but he dispatches with that TIE Fighter pilot in a pretty aggressive way, after he’s already incapacitated the ship. Just seems a little excessive for a Jedi.
Ah well, when you have Jedi space magic powers, why not.
The video was made by talented youtuber Bill Parker (billywarp1), who is based in the United States, and according to the Daily Mail, attends Taylor University in Indiana. Several behind the scenes videos are also available on his channel. Check them out!
At Starship we turn complicated processes into simple behavioural change strategies; easy to understand and act on to maximise your goals. We aim to create high ROI content that will give you a bigger, better voice in your marketplace, helping you better engage with your existing target audience – or get into a conversation with new people.
Ecotech – Corporate video
Uplifting documentary-style piece. Focus on problem-solving and customer-focused culture in a documentary style.
Barry Plant – Process
Evoking authority and trustworthiness while humanising the brand with a stylish illustrated animation.
Barry Plant – Agent videos
Introduction sales tool videos.
Pact Group – Manufacturing video
Focus on innovation, sustainability and people, using animated graphical text overlays.
Sustainability Victoria – Get it right on bin night
Behavioural change campaign, simple clear communications using info graphics to communicate to a broad language base.
Sustainability Victoria – Get it right on bin night
An educational video on how a materials recycling facility works.
BlendCo – Strawberry Fields
Promotional video for BlendCo shot at Strawberry Fields festival.
BlendCo – Juice Cleanse Diary Interviews
Venture Entrepreneur – World-class conference in San Fransisco
Featuring the world’s most successful entrepreneurial speakers.
CSR Viridian – Smart Glass
Informational TVC – with an entertaining personality humanising what’s otherwise an ‘invisible’ and quite technical ‘dry’ product.
…is a 360º interactive Youtube trailer for the upcoming Warcraft film. Titled Skies of Azeroth, it lets you fly across Stormwind, one of the cities in the Warcraft universe, on the back of the gryphon, and it’s amazing. Check it out on Chrome or on your mobile devices (phone/ipad/etc):
Created by Industrial Light and Magic, and MagicxLab, it’s a new VR project by Legendary Pictures. Via Techtimes:
The city will be a familiar site for any player of Blizzard’s hit MMO World of Warcraft. While it’s not an exact recreation of the city from the video game, fans will be able to recognize several iconic landmarks. Look closely at the start of the video below and you will see a spitting recreation of the Valley of Heroes, with statues of the Alliance’s greatest warriors lining the bridge that leads into the city. You can also spot the Cathedral of Light and Stormwind Keep.
The Warcraft trailer isn’t the first to make use of this cool new tech, but it’s (probably) the first entertainment franchise to do so. GoPro has a few 360º interactive trailers, shot on its HERO3+® camera and stitched together with Kolor:
Looking forward to more immersive VR trailers! But first, we’re going to fly over Stormwind again.
Speaking of astronomy, this week’s biggest astronomy news was NASA’s Pluto mission – the #PlutoFlyBy. After 9 years and 3 billion miles of travel, New Horizons flew past Pluto, transmitting incredible images back to Earth:
Via NASA:
The call everyone was waiting for is in. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home just before 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the historic first-ever flyby of Pluto.
“I know today we’ve inspired a whole new generation of explorers with this great success, and we look forward to the discoveries yet to come,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “This is a historic win for science and for exploration. We’ve truly, once again raised the bar of human potential.”
The preprogrammed “phone call” — a 15-minute series of status messages beamed back to mission operations at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland through NASA’s Deep Space Network — ended a very suspenseful 21-hour waiting period. New Horizons had been instructed to spend the day gathering the maximum amount of data, and not communicating with Earth until it was beyond the Pluto system.
“With the successful flyby of Pluto we are celebrating the capstone event in a golden age of planetary exploration,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “While this historic event is still unfolding –with the most exciting Pluto science still ahead of us — a new era of solar system exploration is just beginning. NASA missions will unravel the mysteries of Mars, Jupiter, Europa and worlds around other suns in the coming years.”
Also see Neil deGrasse Tyson geeking out with Stephen Colbert, with bonus ice cream sandwiches:
As Stephen Hawking notes in his congratulatory message, “We explore because we are human.” The universe became a little more awesome this week.
Wow. Check out some of the incredible photographs shortlisted for the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2015 competition. The awards ceremony is in September, where the winner will be announced. Love, love this image of the moon over the alps in Turin, Italy, by Stefano De Rosa. Good luck Stefano!
About the Insight Astronomy Photography award
It’s the biggest competition of its kind, annually showcasing amazing imagery by astrophotographers, by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, sponsored by Insight Investment. As of 2015, it has been running for seven years, and past winners can be found here. Looking to enter for 2016? Here are the details:
Entries to the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016 competition open on Monday 29 February 2016 and must be received by midday (BST) on Thursday 14 April 2016 (the ‘Closing Date’).
The Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition is hosted on the Royal Museums Greenwich website and all entries must be submitted online via the entry form.
Entrants must be over the age of 16 on the Closing Date of the competition.
The consent of a parent or guardian is required for any entrant under the age of 18.
Entrants may submit up to ten photos in total to the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016 competition.
Meanwhile in Russia, its Ministry of Internal Affairs has created an official guide to taking safe selfies after a string of unfortunate selfie-related accidents. During the news conference, Elena Alekseeva, the Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs and Lieutenant Colonel of Police, also proceeded to demonstrate correct selfie technique. Unfortunately, the guide is not in English, but its detailed icons certainly do transcend language. Happy safe selfie taking! Via Wired:
After tragic deaths including a 21-year-old woman in Moscow falling from a bridge and a 17-year-old being electrocuted by rail wires, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has taken the unusual step of educating the public on the risks of selfies. Elena Alekseeva, Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs and Lieutenant Colonel of Police, held a press conference to announce a formal document that will be handed out to citizens.
“Along with all the advantages of the modern world there appear new threats. We would like to remind the citizens that the chase for ‘likes’ in social networks can lead to the road of death,” said Alekseeva. “The accident reports periodically present information about sad accidents with lovers of selfies”
Alekseeva then demonstrated correct selfie etiquette by posing for several with members of the media.
Because why not. You might as well have the absolutely fully branded coffeeshop experience, with printable latte art. Print on the branding, for maximum hipster! Ripples is an ingenious mix of an inkjet and a 3D printer, using tiny little coffee drops to make up an image. How it works:
With the Ripple Maker you’ll turn ordinary coffee into an extraordinary experience. Using patented printing technology, the machine creates inspiring Ripples from any image or text atop the foam layer of coffee beverages. Create a moment and forge a connection with your customers. Make a foam-topped coffee drink by your usual methods. Place the cup on the machine, select an image from the extensive content library or approve your customer’s created design. Your Ripple prints in just seconds. Give your drink the perfect finishing touch.
Ripple Pods are filled with our patented coffee extract made from a high-quality mix of Arabica and Robusta coffee beans. Your Ripples will be printed in coffee, on coffee, and each pod creates more than 1000 Ripples. Included in your monthly service plan.
According to Digital Trends, Ripple Maker isn’t easily available for home use (at least, not cheaply), but it’s already been installed in a handful of NYC locations, and will roll out across the USA in 2016. Chances are, it’ll be coming to hipster Melbourne soon…
Picture credit: Germain Lussier
San Diego Comic Con rolled into full swing last weekend. Unlike many of the other Comic Cons elsewhere in the world, it was, as usual, a massive event that attracted thousands upon thousands of fans of comics, films, pop culture and more. Shows like Game of Thrones often trot out the stars of the show for panels, and big budget films and franchises often have Comic Con exclusive trailers. This year, the best brand event was pulled off by Star Wars, which not only premiered a panel, a Behind the Scenes video, but also a John Williams concert for 6,000 ecstatic fans. Now that’s how you get people excited about your product. For more coverage, check out the many articles on io9, or check out the Comic Con 2015 Playlist below:
About San Diego Comic Con
Probably the biggest event of its kind in the world, SDCC regularly sells out and has to be booked far in advance. A nonprofit organisation, it began in 1970 when a group of comics, movie and science fiction fans decide to hold an event in South California. According to SDCC:
The show’s main home in the 1970s was the fondly remembered El Cortez Hotel in downtown San Diego. In 1979, Comic-Con moved to the Convention and Performing Arts Center (CPAC), and stayed there until 1991, when the new San Diego Convention Center opened. Comic-Con has been at home in that facility for over two decades.
With attendance topping 130,000 in recent years—in a convention center facility that has maxed out in space—the event has grown to include satellite locations, including local hotels and outdoor parks. Programming events, games, anime, the Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival, and the Eisner Awards all take place outside of the Convention Center, creating a campus-type feel for the convention in downtown San Diego.
Google’s artificial neural network is having some seriously weird dreams.
These images are all created through Google’s image recognition neural network, taught to identify things such as buildings and animals in photographs. Then the program is asked to modify the image to emphasize the feature. At a low level, the end result looks like a simple photoshop filter. At a higher level, where the image is fed back into the network again and again, the effect looks like a visual acid trip.
Google has since made its #DeepDream code available to the public. Check out the hashtag on Twitter/Instagram to never sleep again: Gizmodo’s collected a series of its favourites. Or go make your own android trip. From Google:
Google has spent the last few years teaching computers how to see, understand, and appreciate our world. It’s an important goal that the search giant hopes will allow programs to classify images just by “looking” at them. And this is where Google’s deep dream ideas originate. With simple words you give to an AI program a couple of images and let it know what those images contain ( what objects – dogs, cats, mountains, bicycles, … ) and give it a random image and ask it what objects it can find in this image. Then the program start transforming the image till it can find something similar to what it already knows and thus you see strange artifacts morphing in the dreamed image ( like eyes or human faces morphing in image of a pyramid ).
These immersed biospheres – effectively underwater greenhouses – are 20 feet underwater, anchored offshore in Italy, taking advantage of the sea’s constant underwater climate to grow crops. ‘Nemo’s Garden’ is an ingenious idea, if not yet commercially viable on such a small scale, housing plants like strawberries, basil and lettuce. Crop growth rates, apparently, are fantastic. You can watch a livestream of Nemo’s Garden here, and read more about it here. Via their website:
3 years ago Sergio Gamberini was enjoying his summer vacation in Noli, Italy. Scuba diving has always been not only a business related activity, but a passion and a hobby deeply rooted inside him. Everything related to life in the ocean always has had a special place in his heart. His life could be described as constant hard working, family and the ocean.
Having said that, you can easily understand that nobody was surprised when he came up with yet another idea to work at while on vacation.
But this time the idea sounded really, really strange…So, there he goes, he makes a couple of phone calls and starts building, with the help of his team at Ocean Reef Group, a number of small transparent balloons – then, they sink them and fill them with air while underwater, they anchor them and ultimately, plant seeds in a vase inside!
The idea he had was to utilize the properties of the large bodies of water – constant temperature, united with the natural evaporation of a surface of liquid in contact with an air space – to try creating an underwater greenhouse!