Journal
May 26, 2006 | Links
My girlfriend is a scientist. She also wants to be able to turn invisible. She sent me this today…
Light normally bounces off an object’s surface making it visible to the human eye. But John Pendry and colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all.
Metamaterials are exotic composites made of electronic components such as wires and inductors that can be engineered to precisely control the way light travels through them.
Pendry’s team has drawn up plans for a spherical metamaterial structure that would render an enclosed object invisible. “The theory tells us the material properties we need at each point,” says team member David Smith, from Duke University in North Carolina, US. “The challenge is to match those theoretical requirements in the …
May 24, 2006 | Links
Planet Earth versus the humans. A wonderful, thought provoking animation from Three Legged Legs. The message isn’t new but the execution is and I really like it.
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Matt Brett has put my woeful attempt at an E3 round-up to shame with his write ups so I’ll just link through to him from now on.
I’m going to use my delight over the Nintendo Wii, and the new Zelda game, as an excuse for my lack of… well… anything.
I’d been looking forward to Shadow of the Colossus for some time, and on the 17th of February 2006 it was finally released in the UK.
For the uneducated, Shadow of the Colossus is the follow up (but not a sequel to) the critically acclaimed ICO, which reviewed incredibly well, but failed miserably with the consumers. ICO went on to become a massive cult hit and has been re-released alongside Shadow, so hopefully people will pick up on it this time.
The key thing I really like about Fumito Ueda’s games, beyond the immense beauty, is the purity of vision. Both ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are incredibly simple games to play, with very simple objectives. However the mechanics of these games, and the creativity of the developers, have combined to make them some of the most entertaining games you are likely to play.
Unfortunately Shadow isn’t, in my opinion, perfect …
May 19, 2006 | Links
I’ve posted quite a few youtube movies recently so I figured none more wouldn’t hurt.
Here’s Neo (from the Matrix movies), fighting Robocop (erm… from the Robocop movies) fighting it out.
It’s just a shame there was no lightsaber action!
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I like all things interactive, and some of the stuff on the new Getty Images promotional site is incredibly nice.
For those who don’t know Getty Images is a royalty free stock image library. What this means is that publishers, artists, webdesigners and anyone else who needs a photo or graphic of some sort, can come along and buy the rights to use hi quality media in their projects.
Getty Images teamed up with 5 interactive designers asking each of them to create 2 pieces to show off Getty’s image library.
My favourites are the two by Sumona. I could play with those things for hours. In fact this one - information - caused a conversation amongst some of us at work as we tried to work out how it was all done.
For now I am going to go and lose myself in the never ending photo mosaic.
Binary Moon