Activision showed off the state of the art of real-time graphics on Wednesday, releasing this mind-boggling character demo. The character's skin, facial expressions and eyes look so real, it's uncanny.
When you watch this video, see if you think this character has reached the other side of what's commonly called the "uncanny valley," a term first uttered by early robotics guruMasahiro Mori in 1970. It describes the range of sophistication of animated graphics, from one side of the valley where human figures simply look unrealistic, to the middle of the valley — where they look just realistic enough to be creepy — to our side of the valley, where animation is indistinguishable from reality.
Whenever the uncanny valley is mentioned, the animation techniques from the November, 2004 movie Polar Express come to mind. Most viewers noticed the characters weren't quite photorealistic enough to keep them out of the creepy zone. But that was nearly 8 years ago, and graphics technology has made spectacular progress since then.
Une vidéo bluffante : ce monsieur est en réalité une animation réalisée par la société Activision. Une reconstitution incroyable des expressions faciales, de la texture de la peau, etc.
Tracking the behaviour of bacteria as they group together on a surface reveals a 'rich-get-richer' mechanism in which polysaccharide deposition and cellular location amplify in a positive feedback loop.
A $170,000 hot air balloon called the Skywhale has been unveiled to mark Canberra's centenary. The unusual design is already creating public controversy.
The Harvard Microrobotics Lab has demonstrated the first controlled flight of an insect-sized flapping-wing robot. This video shows the 80mg, piezoelectrical...
Living in The Matrix Requires Less Brain Power - ScienceNOW
Sakis Koukouvis's insight:
If you were a rat living in a completely virtual world like in the movie The Matrix, could you tell? Maybe not, but scientists studying your brain might be able to. Today, researchers report that certain cells in rat brains work differently when the animals are in virtual reality than when they are in the real world.
Why, why, why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are now -- and it's because we're clinging to a business model that clearly doesn't work. Education advocate Geoffrey Canada dares the system to look at the data, think about the customers and make syste
Travel around the solar system look at the starts, earth and saturns rings and see how the planets align for years to come. Compare pluto's orbit to our own.
The Moon clung to its magnetic field until at least 3.56 billion years ago, a study suggests — about 160 million years longer than scientists had thought.
Lectures are in Playlists and are alphabetically sorted with thumbnail pictures. No fee, no registration required - learn at your own pace. Certificates can be arranged with presenting universities.
" Dr Ian Green from the School of Education here at Adelaide and I [Allan Carrington] have used Padagogy 101 (introduction to iPad in HE) and Padagogy 201 (more advanced use for L&T) to train over 600 faculty from universities in Australia. During my research I saw lots of great work done by others using Bloom’s Taxonomy including the Revised Taxonomy which has now become the Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. However when I discovered the excellent pioneer work done by Kathy Schrock with “Bloomin’ Apps” I got the idea for the Padagogy Wheel. Dare I say it but it is the next version for mobile learning of the ongoing importance of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom’s is still fundamental to good teaching and learning."
A good starting point for I-pad apps and usage for educational purposes. Great to have the links. As always the first step in a journey that has many twists and turns. It takes you where you want to go but there are many pathways you can take and who knows where they will lead you!Sometimes it's the journey that is important not just the destination.
This is so helpful. As a visual learner I can see how the wheel can be used for home schooling. It is a fantastic resource for contextualising learning.
Mary Coghlan's comment August 19, 2013 8:11 PM
I really like how this is presented. A great approach that presents a number of choices to be used for teaching and learning. Being a visual learner, I find this very accessible.
Both competitive and facilitative interactions between species play a fundamental role in shaping natural communities.
Sakis Koukouvis's insight:
We examined whether the presence of a 'good' neighbouring plant like basil positively influenced the germination of chilli seeds when all known signals were blocked. For this purpose, we used a custom-designed experimental set-up that prevented above- and below-ground contact and blocked chemical and light-mediated signals normally exchange by plants
An ancient astronomical alignment in southern Peru has been discovered by researchers between a pyramid, two stone lines and the setting sun during the winter solstice. During the solstice, hundreds of years ago, the three would have lined up to frame the pyramid in light.
To look at the evolution of modern bird feathers, we must start a long time ago, with the dinosaurs from whence they came. We see early incarnations of feathers on dinosaur fossils, and remnants of dinosaurs in a bird's wish bone. Carl Zimmer explores the stages of evolution and how even the reasons for feathers have evolved over millions of years.
Lesson by Carl Zimmer, animation by Armella Leung.
A new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago.
Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: "satisfactory." And with no feedback, no coaching, there's just no way to improve. Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback -- and lays out a program from his foundation to bring it to every classroom.
A new study uses thousands of infrared photographs of the Saturn system to reveal that the planet’s moons and rings are older than expected. A surface dusting of dark minerals helped conceal their age, but distributed underneath is an abundance of water ice—a telltale leftover from the earliest days of the Solar System, billions of years ago.
An international team of physicists, including researchers from the Universities of York and St. Andrews, has demonstrated that chaos can beat order - at least as far as light storage is concerned.
Sakis Koukouvis's insight:
In a collaboration led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, the researchers deformed mirrors in order to disrupt the regular light path in an optical cavity and, surprisingly, the resulting chaotic light paths allowed more light to be stored than with ordered paths.
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Une vidéo bluffante : ce monsieur est en réalité une animation réalisée par la société Activision. Une reconstitution incroyable des expressions faciales, de la texture de la peau, etc.