Better than the Rasterbator: convert raster images to vector graphics with ONull

Guest post by Paul Fraser.

The computer graphics gods (i.e., geeks) of the world have descended upon the Los Angeles Convention Center for the SIGGRAPH 2010 International Conference and Exhibition. Now in its 37th year, SIGGRAPH draws together tech-minded people interested in graphics research, art, animation, gaming, interactivity, science, education and the Internet for a week-long mashup.

Yesterday, we walked the aisles of the expo and found a number of products jumping on the 3D bandwagon. Whether you think 3D video / film / television is the future or that it’s a passing fad, no one can argue that the amount of 3D eye candy presented this year is enough to make any 3D-hater drool. You can’t walk 10 feet without finding an exhibit that uses the technology in new and fascinating ways.

When it comes to displaying 3D imagery, there are generally two types of technology: displays that must be viewed with 3D glasses (stereoscopic displays), and displays that do not require 3D glasses (autostereoscopic displays). Each technology has its advantages and disadvantages; however, it seems that autostereoscopic technology, though still in its infancy, is the future of 3D technology. If advertisers were to create a 3D video display for a store, for example, they would need the glasses-less technology for passersby to view it. Besides, having to wear glasses to view 3D imagery is becoming too cumbersome. Are you really going to carry around a pair of 3D specs in your pocket?

Sony is at the forefront of autostereoscopic 3D technology. During the Emerging Technologies portion of SIGGRAPH 2010, the company showcased the 360-degree autostereoscopic display prototype we’ve been anticipating trying out since we caught wind of it last week: the RayModeler. The device—which looks like it could have been taken from the set of a Star Wars film—is a compact version of a 3D display enclosed in a cylinder. At first glance, it looks like a high-tech coffee-bean grinder or a blender, but after taking another look, one can view the display from all directions and see a bright, color 3D image. According to Sony, the system is the first display of its kind, featuring special LED light sources that show 360 unique, 24-bit color images in all directions. The user can even control the orientation of the display’s content by using hand motions in proximity to the display (see video above).

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Decades ago Apple pioneered mass-uptake of the mouse, and now they’re out to break new ground with a new type of input device: The Magic Trackpad, announced this morning.

The sleek little rectangle works just like the trackpad on a MacBook(and is made from the same opaque glass), but it’s way bigger, giving you more room to maneuver your mitt; as you can see in the photo below, it’s about the same size front-to-back as Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. And yes, the surface is both clickable and double-clickable.

The device should appeal strongly to minimalists: There’s no wires as it works via Bluetooth, and the sleek, futuristic form is about as pared down as you can get.

I use Expose a lot, and I find even the tiny act of having to move my hand from the mouse to my MacBook’s trackpad is enough to break my workflow. The Magic Trackpad will preclude this, as Expose can be invoked directly from the device.

On top of that, something about touch makes manipulating a mouse across a surface seem anachronistic, like pushing a Tonka truck around as a child. Your correspondent, for one, will be ditching his dust-catching mousepad to dive into full-time touch fingers-first.

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Used to be there was the subject, the camera, and the subject appearing on-camera, like this:

Then we got rid of the camera, replaced it with motion capture, and got this:

And finally we added the camera back in and combined it with motion capture to achieve this:

Once Andy Serkis played Gollum and Zoe Saldana played a blue alien, it didn’t take people long to figure out actors could play other humans, too, and avoid anachronistic makeup or prosthetic sessions. The most interesting manifestation of this is in the new Tron movie, where Jeff Bridges will play the same character (Clu) he played in the 25-year-old original. The twist is that modern-day Jeff Bridges’ actions will be digitized into younger Jeff Bridges on-screen!

“Now you can play yourself at different ages, whether it’s a younger version of yourself or an older version of yourself, digitally,” said Bridges in this Times piece explaining the concept.

This is kind of mind-blowing if you think about it. With this technology, inter-quels (i.e. movies between sequels) become possible: Bruce Willis could go back and do Die Hard 1.5 with his 1989 physique and hair, for instance.

It’s also disturbingly possible that Hollywood could use archival footage to digitize, say, Cary Grant’s face, body and voice, and have George Clooney play Cary Grant playing a movie character. Which is to say, George Clooney in the studio does a take, and the audience sees and hears Cary Grant doing the same take on-screen. Thus you could have long-dead film stars more or less “starring” in completely new movies.

What ramifications might this have for the rest of us outside the film industry? One application I can think of, as the technology trickles down and becomes affordable, is video chat. There’s been some debate as to whether or not people will want to “put their face on” for video chatting, but with self-modeled avatars that are always clean-shaven, or wearing makeup, or dressed nicely, perhaps it will become more palatable. It’s like a high-tech version of those tuxedo-print T-shirts.

While that’s harmless enough, I do hope they leave dead stars alone. Hollywood already tastelessly “resurrected” Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong and Jimmy Cagney for a Diet Coke commercial back in 1991. If digitization and motion capture makes these deceased stars capable of feature-length projects, it will only serve to reinforce the notion that celebrities are immortal. And that’s ridiculous, because they aren’t.

Only Tron is.

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Let’s say you’re an industrial designer toiling away and designing electronic consumer products. During the process you picture your design sitting in someone’s house, providing them with joy and functionality. You hope they’ll appreciate how tight you’ve gotten the tolerances, how clean you’ve made the lines, how ergonomic the controls are, how pretty the colors.

One thing you typically don’t picture: Some burly guy tearing your design to shreds, in an even worse manner than your senior crit, because he’s physically tearing it to shreds. But that’s eventually what’s gonna happen to your lovingly designed object, unless it goes into landfill or you’ve somehow single-handedly conquered obsolescence.

Check out this video by Electronic Recyclers International on how e-waste is actually recycled, it’s pretty eye-opening. I hope they start showing videos like this in design school (if they haven’t already) to inspire the next generation to design things so that they not only fit together well, but come apart in a manner that facilitates their materials being harvested. In the meantime, there’s hammers.

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Folks, we’ve just seen our first portfolio loaded up through Adobe’s Tiltviewer. At first we found it neat–then freaking annoying as we couldn’t easily zoom in on the thumbnail we wanted to see and caused unintended turning and tilting with errant mouse movements.

Check it out yourself and let us know what you think, a sample portfolio is here. Is Tiltviewer awesome, or annoying?

By the by the designer whose work we were trying to see (at the link above) is Liong Mah, the NYC-based knife designer behind Columbia River Knife & Tool’s Eat’N Tool, a sort of multi-tool update to the venerable Spork.

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Just indulge me here.

I’ve never really been one for unboxing (or early adoption), but if there’s any moment to savor the arrival of a long awaited technology product, this would be it. As a web editor, I spend roughly 20 hours a week hunched over a keyboard I’m not using to read online content, and the day that I can bring an article over to the couch and hold it in my hand could not have come sooner.

My iPad arrived via UPS just an hour ago; I greeted the driver WAY over enthusiastically, signed for my box, set it on the kitchen table and wrung my hands for 5 minutes before I decided that, yes, I would document this (in spite of the wonderfully cheeky iPeep Unboxing that precedes).

So here goes, the story in pictures:

It arrived in a generic enough box, and, though Apple attempted discretion (“Return to: AI”), it’s not too difficult to guess what’s inside—I imagine that the UPS truck was stuffed full of these little boxes, all the same.

The package is a simulacra of its contents. At this point I was so excited that I had to stop for a minute (dork).

Obligatory shot of the back of the box—yes, I bought the absolute minimum wireless 16GB version, with no accessories.

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If you’re tired of hearing about the iPad, maybe you better get used to it; the internet fervor seems only to be increasing. Still, Alissa Walker offers us an antidote on her blog Gelatobaby, something a little bit Easter and a little bit iPad: The iPeep Unboxing.

We’re not going to give anything away, except that according to Alissa, “this device is poised to change the future of magazines, newspapers, radio, television, movies, games, education, government, religion, healthcare and sex.”

That’s a pretty big claim. Better take a gander at that unboxing.

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Back before the iPad was revealed, Berg and Bonnier sent us a concept predicting the very same, exploring, in particular, its implications for the digital publishing of periodicals. You can see that video here.

It’s interesting to review the reader comments from that post, given what we know now. Michael Janzen commented that, “If the predictions are correct Apple will continue to move into the old-school digital and print world drawing in new customers and inadvertently putting the old-schoolers out of business simply by following a steeper innovation curve.” And J.R. points out that “something like this will only succeed with the blessing of strong, strategic partners such as the remaining magazine dynasties and other publishers, a la itunes arrangement with record labels.”

Well, it’s only been a few months, but the announcement of the iPad gave the Mag+ development team their chance to make this thing real. Though it may not put magazines out of business yet, they’ve certainly succeeded in teaming up with said strategic partners— the April issue of Popular Science is the first to be digitized for the iPad in this way. <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popular-science/id364049283?mt=8
“>Downloadable from, yes, iTunes, the magazine goes live tomorrow, and may be a nice way to immediately test out the iPad’s multi-touch chops.

Above, Bonnier demonstrates Popular Science +, including dog-earing and background obfuscation, and discusses the new opportunities for art direction that Mag+ presents.

From the team:

Our design vision has been to avoid what our friends at BERG call “a wrist screen running clock software” – we wanted to build the watch. It should feel like you are touching the actual magazine, using your natural body language – not looking through the screen and layers of buttons.

Magazines are a luxury that readers can lose themselves in. We have built a digital magazine for a device you can curl up with on the coach. It allows readers to lean back, away from the browser, and just focus on the bold images and rich storytelling. We wanted to build a linear story with a beginning and end. Because we believe that reduced
complexity increases your immersion. And that the sense of completion is important.

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It’s Ada Lovelace Day, and Adafruit Industries is featuring one woman in technology per hour on their blog. So far we’ve seen <a href="
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/03/24/natalie-jeremijenko-social-robotics-24-hours-of-lady-ada-lovelace-day-ald10/”>Natalie Jeremijenko, Core-contributor Bethany Shorb, Fiona Raby, Kelly Dobson (pictured above, performing machine therapy) and many more!

Ada Lovelace, whom the holiday commemorates, was one of the first computer programmers:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Learn more here and here.

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It’s Ada Lovelace Day, and Adafruit Industries is featuring one woman in technology per hour on their blog. So far we’ve seen <a href="
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/03/24/natalie-jeremijenko-social-robotics-24-hours-of-lady-ada-lovelace-day-ald10/”>Natalie Jeremijenko, Core-contributor Bethany Shorb, Fiona Raby, Kelly Dobson (pictured above, performing machine therapy) and many more!

Ada Lovelace, whom the holiday commemorates, was one of the first computer programmers:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Learn more here and here.

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