Keeping Actors Young Forever Using “Avatar” Technology

Entertainment Weekly’s Popwatch blog has highlighted an interesting idea – what if the technology used in the movie “Avatar” could help keep actors “young forever”? Director James Cameron explains that the scanning process is so detailed that current scans of actors could be used indefinitely:

In a way, Cameron has already pulled off this trick: Sigourney Weaver appears to drop 20 years whenever she slips her consciousness into an alien body in Avatar. But Cameron’s facial scanning process is so precise—zeroing in to the very pores of an actor’s skin—that virtually any manipulation is possible. You may not be able to totally replace an actor—“There’s no way to scan what’s underneath the surface to what the actor is feeling,” the director notes—but it is now theoretically possible to extend careers by digitally keeping stars young pretty much forever. “If Tom Cruise left instructions for his estate that it was okay to use his likeness in Mission Impossible movies for the next 500 years, I would say that would be fine,” says Cameron.

Source: PSFK

Наружная реклама японского подразделения Yahoo умеет различать возраст и пол потребителя

Японское подразделение компании Yahoo Corp. запустило необычную рекламную кампанию на цифровых билбордах, установленных на железнодорожных станциях и в других общественных оживленных местах.

Рекламная кампания была разработана совместно с компанией Comel Co., занимающейся установкой и обслуживанием цифровых билбордов. Специально для акции Yahoo было разработано несколько вариантов роликов, которые меняются в зависимости от возраста и пола потребителя, находящегося перед рекламоносителем.

В билборды вмонтированы камеры, которые с помощью программного обеспечения от компании NEC Soft Ltd фотографируют проходящих мимо людей и определяют их пол и возраст, анализируя структуру лица. После этого на экране появляется соответствующий контент.

Сейчас в акции Yahoo Japan задействовано 500 цифровых билбордов. Позднее планируется расширить географию кампании, удвоив количество билбордов в Токио и Осаке.

Source outdoor.ru

Old toys - new games

Frantz Lasome is working on an augmented reality toy concept that takes make-believe and lays it out in front of your eyes. His project lets kids use their old toys as game pieces and controls in an virtual world. Players battle it out, assigning weapon functions to their real world toys, and can watch the virtual action through special glasses. Though it seems like a fantastic toy, you have to wonder how immersion in an augmented world will effect kid’s developing minds.

Augmented Reality Toys (Work in progress) from Frantz Lasorne on Vimeo.

Source Frantz Lasone via PSFK

Sound Visualization Jewelry

The Sound Advice Project creates custom bracelets of any sound’s waveform. Although the project is aimed at parents who want to make anti-drug message bracelets for their kids, the concept seems full of interesting possibilities.

Source PSFK

The new business isn’t the same as the old business, just with computers.

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Kevin Kelly On Technology As The 7th Kingdom Of Life

There’s a video from the O’Reilly group where Joshua-Michele Ross interviews Kevin Kelly. Kelly discusses the rise of large scale co-operation and the similarity between technology and biology. A couple of quotes:

Socialism 2.0. We don’t have very good terms for what we’re seeing. Collectivism, communism, socialism which have negative connotations in American politics but in fact that’s what a lot of this is: Cooperation on a large scale. Elevating the common collective good and the individual at the same time. That’s the difference with communism which was about bring everyone down to a level.

…What does technology want? It wants us to be happy, it wants our co-operation. Right ow we’re the sexual organs of technology. It wants increasing diversity, increasing complexity, increasing energy density (efficiency), increasing specialization… The patterns that we see technology follows are the same patterns biology and evolution follows. In biology there is extinction, in technology we find that ideas and technologies remain and they are very hard to extinguish… There is almost no extinct technologies.

Source Radar O’Reilly & PSFK