Random thoughts from the Pacific Rim
VRMAG is a great online magazine for Virtual Reality photography. The magazine features new artists every month and has great specials.
Check out their Italian Riviera special or the article about Oxford’s VR effort.
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Wars have been a human blight for as long as we have roamed this planet. I’m not sure if they will ever completely disappear, but nowadays, with global travel, instant information flow, mountains of laws and international agreements, I think we should be able to take them out of the mainstream, sometimes maybe still happening on the frazzled edges of a modern world, but steadily pushed back, revealed as the pasttime of cave men.
And for a while it actually looked pretty good. The 90s were heady with new promises of peace. Borders were falling, arch enemies worked together to actually destroy their weapons. Amazing times.
But some of the cave men are back. Complete idiots in power again. The same characters that gave us several world wars and a cold war just in the last century. They came back with exactly the same airheaded arguments for war that have been used for thousands of years to plunge peaceful and complacent societies into unjust and unwinnable wars.
Open any history book on any page and you will find deja-vu-like scenarios that are right now being played out on the evening news.
And the vicitms haven’t changed either. There are the unsung dead in the civil population that you never hear about if you are not actually part of that very group of people that currently gets the shit bombed out of them.
And the soldiers. Also victims for the most part. The potential mass-murderers always quickly move up the chain to become generals, their psychopathic tendencies way too useful to be wasted on guarding a weapons depot. Dead and wounded soldiers usually are the harmless, young, innocent ones. The ones that search for land mines, hold unholdable positions and do every dirty job known to man.
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The WHTour is a very ambitious project to create VR panoramas for all the sites on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Currently, China and Egypt are covered to a high degree and several other sites in south-east asia are in the works.
You can take a virtual stroll through the Forbidden City or visit the ancient temples of Luxor in Egypt. All without ever leaving your chair…
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It would be an understatement to say that propaganda posters had an important role in how the Chinese Communist Party communicated with the public.
Especially in the early years of the People’s Republic, when radios were still sparse and travel was hard, a few strategically placed posters in each town and village were maybe the only reinforcement of what the party leadership thought was the right way to do things.
Many of these posters are amazingly colorful and and – in retrospect – charming in their naivety, while some of course have lost nothing of the poignancy. Stefan Landsberger has a large collection of these posters on his site and he is probably one of the leading western experts to share his knowledge about this specific art form on the net.
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I’ve personally found 3D rendering never boring, it just always eats up way too much of my time… I’d love to do more of it again, but it’s far back in my list of things to do. Oh well.
And here’s a guy who really seems to love rendering – for a year now, he created a new 3D scene almost every day on his site, Boring3D.
His work shows a lot of quirky humour and unsuppressible creativity and is guaranteed never boring!
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If you have never played Elite – especially if you were just plain too late to experience Elite when it was fresh and exciting, then this article may sound like a discussion of wheat prices in ancient Rome.
Oh, Elite…
When Elite came out in 1984, it pretty much blew all other computer games out of the water. On the BBC computer, the first platform it was published, its sales reached saturation – one game sold for every existing machine that can load it. That will probably never happen again in the history of game development.
I’m bringing this up not just because this game took away my summer of 1984, but also because there is a great article about the history of Elite and the two teen-genius programers who came up with it.
And if you want to check Elite out for yourself, you can play it in a Java applet that emulates a ZX Spectrum with Elite loaded up. Good Luck!
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