Other Ten Percent 5/23/11

May 23 2011

Who’s in the mood for a good old fashioned OTP? Because I totally do. So let’s do what I used to do a lot and have a whole day where we basically just get excited about how cool and bizarre the future’s going to be because it’s been a while since the future really made me super happy and that sounds like GOOD TIMES.

World Builder
You know how you always secretly thought that how the holodeck would possibly work and how somebody could program for it is more fascinating than the actual ren-faire bullshit that went on in there? …Or was that just me? Either way this thing is super fascinating because it’s about the making of simulations instead of just the experiencing of them.
Warning: Gets stupidly romantic.
Note: I want the AR interface this guy has.

Augmented Reality: NuFormer with Kinect projection-mapping
It was really only a matter of time before somebody did a kinect hack onto one of these things it’s such a low-effort high-reward little trick that I’m actually amazed that it took as long as it did.
Warning: There’s a lot of AR stuff here today.
Note: You’ve probably seen projection mapping a lot like this before if you’re a long time reader.

Thor concept art includes a complete map of Asgard
Technically Asgard is contemporaneous to modern day earth but they’re so technologically advanced that they fall under the indistinguishable from magic clause for technology you don’t want to explain so I think this counts as futuristic. Especially since movie Asgard looks like Walt Disney’s fever dream of what Epcot Center would look like if it had sex with a calliope.
Warning: Contains rainbow bridges.
Note: The production design was totally the best part of this movie.

You know it’s a futuristic day when I’ve got two Ben Bashford posts on here. This one is sorta the oposite of the Kinect projection map post. this is actually relatively hard to do but doesn’t impress yet because it’s sort of a shambling frankenstein monster of interface design. It seems like they worked in the accelerometer stuff but haven’t yet figured out the interface possibilities/problems with the fact that when you move the projector the projection moves as well.
Warning: Disney is getting in on the AR game and that ought to terrify you.
Note: This is the end of the AR stuff.

The Real Reason Why Bicycles are the Key to Better Cities
I’ve got to say that I’m not quite as confident about the positive effects of this as the author of the piece since riding my bike often just makes me upset at how shitty it is to ride bikes in modern cities and then I don’t want to do it again for a while, but I like anything that contains intense recontextualisation and the idea of bikes as tools to help people become informed urban planners is pretty neat to me.
Warning: Contains hippy bullshit.
Note: Kinda makes you want to ride bikes.

The hidden posthuman messages in Pixar movies
I sorta don’t want to ruin this one with my own commentary so you should just go read the article. I have no idea how much of this message is actually intended and how much it’s simply the result of changing social mores and I’d totally like to find out.
Warning: Contains a lot of theory about children’s movies.
Note: The character design on Wall-E is still the best pro-robot propaganda in history.

The New Aesthetic
Warren Ellis knows what I’m talking about. Let’s examine what the future is going to look like and lets assume the answer is SUPER WEIRD. Pixelated representations of reality spilling back out into reality making it actually pixelated. The territory becoming the map. Attempts at visualizing digitized ways of seeing like visualizing motion as a distinct kind of sight rather than just an aspect of it and that’s not even getting into the stuff behind the links here. This is some seriously weird stuff that you will probably not link around to friends but that I highly recommend digging into for a little bit.
Warning: may not be as exciting to everyone else as it is to me.
Note: Seriously though that pixel camouflaged jet is cool to EVERYBODY though right?

Julius Caesar Pt. II
Okay so this does not actually contain the future. …Unless time is cyclical which is not actually an argument I’m attempting to make in today’s OTP so we’re moving on from that. However, KATE BEATON IS BACK YOU GUYS and that basically means excitement no matter what time period you are looking at.
Warning: Contains man-sized babies.
Note: I guess you can make an argument that this fits into the future theme because of Caesar’s awesome way of fucking with Calpurnia but let’s not ruin that great comic.


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