POSTFUTURISTIKA

toio

Programmable robotics toy from SONY uses small minimalist blocks with personality, allowing to be creative with papercraft:

Another video here better presents how you can use a controller and even create your own sumo robots:

From Spoon & Tamago:

Build, play, inspire. That’s the idea behind Sony’s new toy for kids, designed to inspire a future generation of robotics engineers. Toio is the result of 5 years of research into developing a toy that’s simple enough for kids to use, but also sophisticated enough to create a figurative sandbox where kids can explore the inner-workings of robotics engineering.

Toio, at first glance, is stunningly simple: the core of the toy is just 2 white cubes with wheels. But don’t be fooled by their appearance. The tiny cubes pack a whole lot of tech. They respond to motion, are able to detect the exact location of the other, and can be programmed but also remote controlled. 

You can find out more at the official Toio website here

SVBDIVIDED

Boiler Room - Ash Koosha

Musician Ash Koosha performs set for Boiler Room using Virtual Reality equipment including the HTC Vive:

Iranian-born, London-based, multi-instrumentalist Ash Koosha is coming by our studio on Thursday for a truly spellbinding A/V experience. It will be involve him wearing a VR headset, so we’re expecting some pretty insane outcomes! 

RoboAction

Painting series by Dragan Ilić features abstracted mark-making using an industrial robot, sometimes carrying and guiding the artist himself:

The artist constantly transposes into the third dimension his decade’s long-running conceptual practice based on the usage of pencils as the basic draftsman’s tool, starting primarily with the media of performance art, installation and sculpture in extended field. Gradually, over the years, his expressive and mechanical compositions have become even more advanced with the development of modules, diverse in shape and sizes, devices designed for the task of mounting and holding his drawing tools, which has led ultimately to the construction of an appropriate drawing machine. Construed for non-artistic purposes, these robots have been reshaped into special draftsmanship implements with which the author is capable of processing his ideas at far greater speed and with considerably greater precision. The metamorphosis of the artistic work is positioned at a point where human and machine activity intersects, resulting in an interaction that is essentially based on the need to transcend the limitations of the human body. 

World’s First Tattoo by Industrial Robot

Collaboration between @appropriateaudiences and the Autodesk Pier 9 residency program is an experiment in robotic tattooing:

This is incredibly cool!

Next Generation Photometric Scanning

Infinite Realities discuss their improved system for producing highly realistic human 3D scans which can even capture intimate details of skin:

Over the last 2 years we’ve been busy drilling down on our new capture technique for scanning faces and busts of people. In the hope to try and improve the scanning process on from Photogrammetry. Inspired by the incredible research of Paul Debevec at USC ICT, Dr. Abhishek Dutta and William Smith based on the Photometric Scanning process. Our solution has a few extra features to add to the process. We use our own custom software application to generate normal maps, specular separated and multi light reference information. 

… IR’s scanning system can capture high resolution reference data for use in game and visual effects pipelines. The sort of data produced is perfect for real-time and offline rendering by comparing results in the view-port directly to measured scan data. We can capture synchronized RAW (.exr) multi-light data, non polarized and cross polarized from up to 50x angles of a subject very quickly.We are able to synchronize over 50 DSLR’s capturing RAW data over multiple PC’s using USB 3.1, reliably.The system is using a custom built mixed spherical gradient illumination lighting solution as well as separate flash heads. We can capture all the necessary lighting directions, cross and non polarized as well as hot flash shots for as many directions as required.