Puppets of the Future?

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo

I don't even own an Xbox360, but I keep on seeing amazing videos of what the Kinect can do and it really intrigues me. These guys have hacked the Kinect in such a way that it allows them to control the motions of a bird that they created. I think this is an extremely important development in technology because we may start to see actual tangible objects making way for projections and motion tracking. Even as something for children to interact with, I can only imagine that this opens up much more possibilities than a physical hand puppet and in a few years it could be quite a standard thing to see.

Tilt-shift Time-lapse

Yes, it's just another time lapse style video with a tilt shift after added afterwards, but the interesting thing here is the camera that was (supposedly) used to film this. The Samsung HMX-R10 is an extremely affordable consumer camera that has built in settings especially for time lapse filming. This would save a lot of time when editing as the footage does not need to be sped up and this eliminates rendering time.

The camera also films in 250 and 500fps modes so one can achieve super slow mo shots quite easily - the only issue is that the quality is no longer full HD. Still, it would be good for experimenting and seeing what would be good to film.

Amazing Ants

It is a pretty well known fact that ants can do a lot in large numbers but I have never seen something highlight it as much as this. I think it could be worth doing a time lapse with insects in large numbers as it really shows them in a completely different way. It's hard to believe that they completely destroyed all of the gecko and it was fascinating to see them move the bones around as well. There's definitely strength in numbers.

Kinect Hacking

This is more so a memo for me as something to look back at next semester when doing some installations, but it is still extremely interesting to see what we can do with this technology.