The Maccabees recorded a liveperformace surrounded by their fans with a Kinect equipped Alexa on a Technocrane. This enabled them to shoot their video on film and switch to 3D renders of their performance smoothly. The fact that they used a Kinect gave them the freedom to render the material out in any way they want, and so they did.
Always thought these kinds of shots were CG? Not always. This super-fast, super slow-mo, robotic camera rig makes the most amazing shots possible, with precise camera moves, even motion easing, all within fractions of a second. Also check out what people have been doing with it in this showreel.
The Internet map is a project of Ruslan Enikeev and visualises 350.000 websites from 196 countries and all domain zones. All is colorcoded by nationality and clustered by topic what makes navigating it a bit more fun.
project combines the collective talents of musicians, dancers, programmers, designers and animators to create an amazing visual instrument. Creating music through motion is at the heart of this creation and uses the power of the Kinect to capture movement and translate it into music which is performed live and projected on a huge wall.
Sweden’s iZettle has developed a mini chip-card reader + app that turns your iPhone and iPad into a mobile cash register. I can definitely imagine that this is an interesting development for small business owners and mobile companies (think: taxi-drivers, bike-messengers, etc). The iZettle service is now available across Scandinavia and the UK, and hopefully soon in the rest of the EU.
Satellite Eyes is a simple Mac app that automatically changes your desktop wallpaper to the satellite view of where you are, right now. Pull your laptop out somewhere new, and your desktop will automatically change to the view from overhead.
One of my good intentions this year is to spend less time on Facebook – and I’m not the only one. To make sure it’s not the road to hell I installed Chrome Nanny. If you find yourself killing a little too much time on sites like Reddit, it can help you keep focused by partially limiting or outright blocking distracting sites. The add-on is not brand new but it can help you out in the new year.
Here’s a nice and interesting project by French web developer Benjamin Netter. My Next Trip uses FourSquare’s API to help you plan your next weekend city trip. With this project Benjamin won the grand price in FourSquare’s ‘Global Hackathon’.
