Lets Go Psychedelic! II

Its weird, its unsettling, its silly fun - and I couldn't resist to make more! I think the visual impact of Google's "machine-dream-pictures" hits you the hardest on the most common motives. The contrast between normal and - well - not normal makes it simply jump into your face ;-)

While this is a pretty weird effect of the company tinkering with neuronal networks, its of course only a side-product of their AI-research. But it kind of shows you where the direction is going at and how powerful that stuff already is. Just as humans can recognize a few dots and lines organized in a certain way as a "face" (like at the end of the paragraph above), they are teaching their machines to do the same: recognize and interpret patterns.
If nothing else, it tells us at least a bit about how the human mind works. How it recognizes things like faces faces and what exactly happens when this pattern-interpreting runs a bit out of control (like when dreaming or hallucinating).

This time I added also some brief description under the original files. So you get some background information to the photo, but without distracting you from the impression the modified (or "weirdified") picture.

Ok, enough rambling and theorizing lets get you some creeps!

This landscape shot was taken at SL12B. Its actually a 32x32 parcel!

One of the buildings at the Elven Village at Dark Wishes.

A ruin at Dark Wishes.

Prof. Wickentower's clank-workers in his old airship workshop

A - already - pretty crazy art-installation at SL12B.

My Dream Generator, already the name is simply suiting.

The DJ Stage at SL12B

Tessie, the mascot of Tesla Island, home of Unzipped.

No, I was not hunting that dinosaur. Its just sleeping!

New Babbage at sunset.

A Field-Trip Through Our Cosmic Neighborhood...

...can be made here. Nice to see more and more complex interactive 3D animations for the webbrowser!

Our close neighborhood...

...our distant neighborhood. can you find your house?

If you haven't clicked already the link on top of the page, try this one ;-)

A Great Film That Never Been (At Least Not In Our Reality)

If you are into science fiction you might have heard that it was a rather long and painful story to eventually get Frank Herbert's epic space opera Dune to the big screen in 1984. And if you find the way David Lynch did adapt the story odd or too "artsy", then you perhaps should stop reading right here.
Ah you didn't! Well, about 10 years before him, the Chilean-French filmmaker and author Alejandro Jodorowsky had its go on the story too. Sadly the project got abandoned. It would have certainly been a memorable experience as this quote from Jodorowsky's concepts shows:

I do not want that the man conquers space
In the ships of NASA
These concentration camps of the spirit
These gigantic freezers vomiting the imperialism
These slaughters of plundering and plunder
This arrogance of bronze and thirst
This eunuchoid science
Not the dribble of transistorised and riveted hulks
The divine one
The delirious one
The superb one
CHAOS
UNIVERSAL
I want magical entities, vibrating vehicles
To prolong to be to it abyss
Like fish of a timeless ocean. I want
Jewels, mechanics as perfect as the heart
Womb-ships anterooms
Rebirth into other dimensions
I want whore-ships driven
By the sperm of passionate ejaculations
In an engine of flesh
I want rockets complex and secret,
Humming-bird ornithopters,
Sipping the thousand-year-old nectar of dwarf stars... 

Oh, and Salvador Dalí was cast as emperor - read the full story here!

Amazing 3D Scans of Museum Pieces!

While browsing through my bookmarks I discovered an article to a fantastic new project by the Smithonian Institute (which has the short and sexy url www.si.edu): They offer high quality 3D scans of their museum exhibits on their site - and you can even view them in your browser!






Besides several fossils and objects of historic significance (see above) there is also a scan of the Liang Bua Cave, where a new species of cavemen was found in 2003 - wow!

You can also pretty easily change rendering properties like colours, lightsources and reflection, as you can see on this happily metallic shining mammoth ;-)

Of course I have to call this "Heavy Metal", love me for this or not! :p

Its pretty mindblowing, isn't it? So far their collection isn't huge (just consider the amount of work put in each model!), but its very impressive already and a glance on what will be possible in the not-so-far future.

Oh and all models are available as wavefront (*.obj) files for download too. Of course only for personal, non-commercial use. Contrary to the models you can access via your browser however, the files are pretty huge and its quite impossible to do anything with them without high-end equipment: the Wright Flyer model is almost 700 MB large and consists of about 6 million (!) verticles (= the "dots" a 3D model is made of), so I guess the resolution is very close to the raw data from the scan.

Now stop wasting time here and see for yourself! Its so cool ;-)