GENOMICON

So obviously, off the back of the small rant-ette about The Internet being The Blue Spaghetti Monster, I found these rather fab chandeliers that someone in England makes.

The first one being called snail-eye, which is what I’m on about in this posting…

Basically what I want (kindof) is a tiny 360 degree lens on a stick. Something that you can use to take a 360 degree shot of absolutely everything in your immediate environment…. work out the dimensions/perspective etc in software. I don’t think snails eyes do this… but they look as though they should, so that’s kindof the inspiration.

There are a bunch of companies doing parabolic mirrors eg: www.0-360.com

But they ain’t quite there yet I don’t think. I think I’ve seen one that can do this with a lens as well, but what I have in mind is something really really small. LED-sized or smaller.

There would be loads of uses for these – from keyhole-surgery to remote-tourism… if you could make them small enough (and that is kindof the point) you could sprinkle a whole load of them connected to inter-communicating rfid chips (or something) and someone wearing 3d glasses could be given a simulation of walking between them. Maybe.

I wish I was back in Prague. That’s all.

This was at least partly inspired by the news that…

A miniature telescope implanted into the eye could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart.

(from : via)

This is your planet.

You live here alone and sit all day under a giant mushroom talking to a persian cat who wears brass spectacles and reads Proust aloud and smokes a cheroot etc. You have a car with butterfly wings and there are peacocks and seahorses and daffodils that reach up to the sky. This is what it’s like in winter:

You have friends who live on other similar planets…

and occasionally baby planets peel off and go on their way…

Anyway. This is your planet. Look after it. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

This turned up today

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

A particularly cool variation on the tilt-shift photography that has been turning up of late.

from flickr : House Photography

There’s a Flickr group devoted to it, and excellent tutorials about the place to make sure the meme is propogated etc (when did so many people turn into teachers?)

from flickr : articnomad

Apparently Fuji have released a 3D digital camera

as reported here (orig : www.giz3d.com), although I’m entertaining mild doubts that that is a real photo? It looks like something from the 70s.

This is a technology I’ve had my eye on for a while because it makes real immersive virtual reality so much more interesting – and there is a tendency for big-budget movies to become more immersive as well – Harry Potter, Star Wars, Pirates of the Carribean etc – whole worlds are created and people don’t just want to sit back and watch a story… they want to hang out in the world. Games are coming from the opposite direction – sooner or later they’re going to meet in the middle… but for it to be really immersive, it’s kindof contingent on films etc being shot in 3D

So I was particularly interested when this turned up

from Red who are poised to knock the mega-buck film cartel sideways because they can produce cinema quality film for a fraction (and I mean thousands instead of hundreds of thousands) of the price. It’ll change the way the business works I suspect.

All of which reminds me of these old view-finder things that I inherited from my Grandfather’s place – they look like these :

but are from the 1950s – some cool old Sci Fi – 2000 leagues under the sea etc. I wish I knew how to digitise them. Some sort of projector I guess.

Technology never dies… this is one of the ways that tech evolotution is different from biological evolution.