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.

Lets Go Psychedelic!

Since Google was giving its neural networks LSD a few weeks ago, I was desperately waiting for a way to make my own pictures of that kind (without having to deal with some hardcore coding that is). Today I stumbled over this lovely little link and well - best see for yourself.
My selection contains pictures taken roughly in the last 8 months or so. Beneath every weirdo-version is the regular one for comparison (and to settle your shaken minds again!). I hope you enjoy them.

2nd Week Of The SL12B - Part 2

As promised yesterday, here is the continuation of my SL12B gallery. Some of the buildings you can find there belong to the finest you can find in SL - and outside of it.
Of course building quality isn't everything. Some exhibits impress with clever ideas, making extensive use of the possibilities virtual worlds do offer - others look just damn cool!

Not a borg-anthill: Astonish DJ Stage

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 ;-)

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 ;-)