Machine Thinking

Kevin Atkinson created a neat virtual ball pit application that works in real time:

I’ve been playing with real-time physics libraries for a while, both 3d and 2d, and I’ve been wanting to do something for a while, but I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to come up with anything that grabbed me. But a couple weeks ago I had a brainwave and wrote this in just a couple days.

For those interested in such things, I didn’t use Box2D, which seems the current champ in developer mindshare in this tiny niche. I started out using it, and it’s quite nice, but it just wasn’t fast enough when I used enough circles/pixels to generate an intelligible representation of the video stream (there’re about a 1000 used in the demo above). Luckily, I chanced across the chipmunk physics library which uses some kind of fancy-pants geometric hashing to speed up collision testing, and it works quite nicely in real-time with 1000 pixels/circles.

Link

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“A Series of Passionate but Arbitrary Decisions”

“It’s the things you can’t change that shape you”

“No Reward for Good Behavior”

More information on the artist here

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Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there

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The last segment of Disney’s Magic Highway USA. While much of it will likely never come true, there is a surprising amount that hasn’t yet, but you can imagine the not distant future when cell and GPS technology will be more closely integrated into cars.

Possibly Related Posts:

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Jim Henson (yes, that Jim Henson) explores what it means to be trapped by time and machines.From the IMDB listing for “Time Piece”:

Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this nine-minute, experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson-and starred Jim Henson! Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, Time Piece enjoyed an eighteen-month run at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award for outstanding short subject.”

Possibly Related Posts:

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Possibly Related Posts:

• shinya kimura
• Magnitka – Camera man’s cut
• The train that never stops at the station
• A robot that can balance on a ball
• Turing Machine