Last year was arguably the year that made Projection Mapping known to the ‘masses’. Ok, not the masses, but quite a lot of people. This is a technique whereby projectors are positioned in front of existing physical objects whose 3d form has been mapped in software, allowing the projected ‘video’ (graphics) sequences to make use of it to create unbelievably cool effects. The end-result is a blurring of real and projected, an unbelievable sight, similar to that of seeing a hologram for the first time =)

The ‘effect’ has been part of artists and advertisers (luckily people of exceptional skill and æsthetics — something quite rare) and it has livened up what has traditionally be works of arguable value. I’d normally say here that I hope this will stay within the realm of competent, æsthetically coherent people, but I’m sure that hip ‘video artists’ that are content with repeatedly playing back short sequences of video or projecting triangle meshes on screens as well as moronic advertisers will find out sooner rather than later and make projection mapping the tool for unprecedented kitsch experiences. You still have time to watch some impressive examples of the technique below.

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I’ve mentioned blender before; it’s one of the open source projects that I’ve followed for years, a project that I love and one that’s has consistently impressed me since I spent a weekend learning the basics of its operation in 2002. At Cosmical Technology, we’ve been using blender for quite a while; some of the GEO|ADS graphics (e.g. the globe with the atmosphere originally used in the GEO|ADS service page), some of the AthensBook graphics and other creative work that we’ve been doing over the years are based on, or are themselves blender renders; we’ve used it for glass surfaces, cloth simulation (the ‘covered up’ icon we used in various presentations and this blog post from 2009) and many other features that were relatively recently added and take blender to a whole new level.

This open source project has been a staple of our ‘design’ arsenal for a while, and while it is by no means (yet) a competitor to the mid to high level commercial products that cost thousands of euros and people use exclusively for films and video games, it should definitely be in their radars as it’s going to be giving them a run for their money sooner than they expect.

Version 2.6 will bring an overhauled core, make most of the application scriptable/automated — in the process allowing for sophisticated add-ons (and hopefully a great community), improve performance (in some areas by a factor of 4-5x), and will introduce a rethinked UI that seems extremely promising. I’ve been goofing around with the 2.5 alpha builds ever since they appeared and while they were extremely unstable they were a great introduction to the new way of working with the application. Recently 2.54 (beta) came out and this is a build that seems to be usable for most of our work. One of the areas that blender 2.5x has I’ve dabbled a bit in the past few weeks is sculpting, a feature that was only found in specialised commercial software packages just a couple of years ago and one that’s still a hot topic.

In the process of acclimatising with sculpting in blender 2.54 I created a — trivially simple — 5 minute (wannabe) moon-like surface on a subdivided cube. The face count on this graphic was in the millions and blender performed admirably. There are still several catches (e.g. performance improves significantly if you start with a subdivided surface), and I’m sure that the final 2.6 will — once again — surprise everyone with how much better it is than the beta, but I’m extremely impressed by the work the blender developers have done.

In a few short years and with some additional work on a few key areas where blender is currently lacking (the built-in renderer and integration with external ones comes to mind), I’m sure that blender will become the choice of more and more professional 3d artists for their work, let alone amateurs like myself.

In February 2007, ISO and the IAEA created a new symbol for Ionising Radiation that complements (see “partially replaces”) the classic trefoil that’s been in use for more than sixty years. The new symbol is a red triangle with a black border that contains the trefoil, a number of jagged edges emanating from it and underneath it a skull and bones and a man running. All in black. You can find a picture of the logo here. I cannot copy it here as it is copyrighted by ISO/IAEA.

The new symbol is a ridiculously bad design for a number of reasons and at a number of levels. The reason for the new symbol is that the old one, our ‘beloved’ trefoil, was not intuitive and those not educated with regards to its meaning might not grasp its importance. While there is some merit to this, the argument is moot: the trefoil, as with the biohazard trefoil, were designed this way and their significance should be taught to everyone that might be in contact or near radioactive/biohazardous areas or materials. They are not supposed to be intuitive, but they do satisfy many of the conditions for successful symbols: they are relatively simple, not language specific and easy to discern for both people that are colourblind or that have reduced eyesight.

The new symbol is an attempt for a more intuitive representation of the danger. Yet the presence of the old radioactivity trefoil is kind of defeating its purpose; if people do not know what the trefoil is, the skull and running man will only provide half the story. They may not realise how serious the danger is or choose to ignore the sign alltogether. Exactly what they would do in the old case, if they didn’t know what the trefoil meant.

Moreover, the new symbol is far worse in terms of colour contrast (black over red is hardy as good as black over yellow) and it is also extremely cluttered; this means that it’s probably going to be extremely difficult to discern in small sizes or by people that cannot see very well.

If anything, I find the ISO/IAEA decision bad, not because they chose to replace the trefoil, but because they did such a bad job in finding an alternative symbol. In the end, however, use of the new symbol requires permission from those organisations, whereas the trefoil is free to use. Given how bad the new symbol is, I guess many people that don’t have to use it will keep on using the old one anyway.

Just a few weeks after Tiger was announced in 2004, I was chatting with a friend about how I thought Core Image could revolutionise the bitmap editing capabilities of applications on Mac OS X and, of course, how this would translate into an abundance of competitive image manipulation/editing applications making use of Apple’s optimised routines, the GPU etc. For a while I even toyed with the idea of writing one myself, as I had grown tired of Photoshop Elements, annoyed with Photoshop’s price tag and frustrated with GIMP’s unusable, nonsensical UI. Upon getting Tiger, in spring 2005, I spent some time looking at the example code and putting together some primitive Cocoa application that could more or less apply Apple’s ready made effects, in addition to doing some basic transformation of an image. My efforts were purely an academic exercise, getting myself familiar with some of Apple’s new APIs and playing around with a brand new version of XCode and the system frameworks. Obviously I couldn’t have been the only one and fortunately for us the efforts of others were bound to become much more than dusty old code in some src folder in a home directory.
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