Tag: video

Super zoom

The classic short film Powers of 10 (1977) propelled viewers on a journey from a Chicago park into deep space and then back down to the scale of a single proton. In The Super Zoom, the Brazil-based graphic designer Pedro Machado’s visualisation dives even deeper into the realm of the subatomic and theoretical. While the original film by Charles and Ray Eames zoomed in to a scale of 10-16 m at most, Machado’s film draws on 40 years of quantum research – not to mention significant advances in 3D rendering technology – to drill down to the unfathomably small scale of 10-33 m, brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and imagination. The mind bending animation uses a framework of quantum gravity in which a gravitational field exists at these smallest conceivable scales.

Paris Through History

In 2012, a company called Dassault Systèmes launched an interactive application that allowed you to move about in a 3D historical reconstruction of Paris at different points in its history. The application seems to have fallen into disrepair so that you can’t actually use it, but the 13-minute video above offers a tour through several time periods, including: 52 BCE. The area was home to a Celtic group called the Parisii, just before the Romans conquered the settlement. 2nd century CE. The Romans ruled here until 486 CE; they called the city Lutetia. 1165-1350. The medieval period. Paris was one of the largest cities in Europe. 1789. A look at the Bastille during the French Revolution. 1887-1889. The construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair. It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for more than 40 years (eclipsed by the Chrysler Building).

Kitty Hawk Plane

Kitty Hawk showed off its latest concept—an 8-motor prototype that uses an unconventional forward-swept wing, and is purportedly 100x quieter than a conventional helicopter. The company calls it Heaviside, after noted physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who advanced a variety of theories and innovations in mathematics, electronics, and communications in the early 20th century.

Atlas gymnastics routine

Atlas uses its whole body — legs, arms, torso — to perform a sequence of dynamic maneuvers that form a gymnastic routine. We created the maneuvers using new techniques that streamline the development process. First, an optimization algorithm transforms high-level descriptions of each maneuver into dynamically-feasible reference motions. Then Atlas tracks the motions using a model predictive controller that smoothly blends from one maneuver to the next. Using this approach, we developed the routine significantly faster than previous Atlas routines, with a performance success rate of 80%.