Animation Spotlight: The Falcon

Retrostalgia goes avian, or what old cameras have to do with humanitarianism.

We love steampunk. We love stop-motion. And we love vintage cameras. Thereby, we absolutely adore The Falcon — a delightful steampunk stop-motion animation composed entirely of macro-photographed hardware pieces from disassembled vintage and antique cameras, for that indulgent analog/digital experience.

The story stars Professor Weston (ISO 50), Silly Patty (+2/-2 EV) and ‘Howell’ the Owl (f/256), as they journey throughout the Focal Kingdom searching for dinner, with cameos by Falcon Minette, Argus AF & C3, Mercury II, Yashica TL, assorted Weston Light Meters, and various Polaroid Land Cameras. (Read the full story synopsis here.)

The film comes from The Shamptonian Institute, a wonderful humanitarian / culture collective that engages in anything from disaster relief advocacy to vinyl recordings preservation.

We encourage you to explore their fascinating library of media artifacts, including vintage ads and retro Eastern European postage stamps.

The Future of Data Tags: Bokodes

Japanese blurs, or what amateur photography has to do wtih tech innovation.

QR codes may be a hot topic these days, but the MIT Media Lab, true to their penchant for one-upping innovation, have come up with a formidable QR-killer. Bokodes — from “barcode” and bokeh, the Japanese word for the blurred area around a photographer’s point of focus — are new camera-based data tags with the capacity to hold a few thousand times more data than traditional barcodes.

Ten times smaller than barcodes, Bokodes’ low-cost optical design can be read from as far as 4 meters away, much farther than barcodes, by taking an out-of-focus photo with any off-the-shelf camera. Bokodes can also encode directional and angular information — something barcodes can’t do.

With the proliferating implementations of good ol’ QR codes, we can only imagine the possible applications of Bokodes — from crowd gaming in public spaces to helping interactive interfaces like Microsoft Surface determine the position and identification of objects placed on them. And although we probably won’t be seeing them hit the mainstream anytime soon, we have enough faith in geek culture to trust that brilliant applications are already being cooked up.

Bokodes come from the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab. The team is currently working on holographic Bokodes, which would greatly reduce the cost and size.

Building Rome in a Day: Crowdsourced 3D Cities

Reconstructing Rome, or what 496 computer cores and an autistic savant have in common.

Crowdsourcing has clearly been the cultural darling of late. And while some of its most successful applications, from Wikipedia to reCAPTCHA, rely on “active crowdsourcing” — building the collective product by actively soliciting user input — others are starting to work wonders with “passive crowdsourcing,” using user-contributed content that is already available on the web.

Building Rome in a Day, a new project out of the University of Washington GRAIL lab, does just that, using 150,000 Flickr images tagged “Rome” to reconstruct the iconic city in 3D. Because tourist photos are taken from a multitude of vantage points, stitching them together into a cohesive 3D image creates rich and spatially accurate models.

The Rome project, which took 21 hours on a cluster of 496 computer cores, reconstructed some of the city’s most famous landmarks — the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Cathedral, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon.

The team has also begun reconstructing other cities — Venice, which took 250,000 images and 65 hours, and Dubrovnik, at a more modest 57,845 photos and 22.5 hours.

The ongoing project has fascinating applications in reconstructing not only static landscapes, but also dynamic events as they unfold — in the era of citizen journalism, imagine using public images of anything from natural disasters (like the 2005 Indonesian tsunami) to political protests (like the recent unrest in Iran) to create an accurate record of history.

Or, you can always have a genius autistic savant fly over in a helicopter and draw frighteningly accurate panoramas on a 16-foot canvas.

via CT2

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.