Steven Diffey

This really reminds you how good we have it these days.

Although, I’m surprised that this wasn’t ever an actual postal service. I guess it’d be difficult to monetise the results.

Via Urlesque

More retro imaginings in a previous post

Aphex Twin, a musical visionary capable of twisting your head in knots, blew the audience away with his performance on Saturday at L.E.D. Festival. He was greeted with uncertainty as to what he would deliver, but his mixture of hectic beats, dreamy melody and the occasional dubstep vibe kept the crowd on their toes.

What took the show to even mesmerising heights however was the visual extravaganza, which at first appeared lo-fi, but progressed to a full assault on the eyes. A live facial recognition system was used to map faces in the audience and overlay the image of his own, trademark distorted face.

The juxtaposition of the MC’s in bunny outfits was also brilliant.

Back in 1975 a group of engineers at Kodak, headed by inventor Steve Sasson, tried to develop the first camera that didn’t use any form of light-sensitive film.

Vintage 1975 portable all electronic still camera

It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.

The inventors cobbled it together out of used parts, without a clue as to how their device would evolve over the next three and half decades. When they previewed it at the time they were of course faced with questions like:

Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like?

How’d have thought that digital photography would be where it is today.

Steve Sasson’s full write up is available to read here

Via today and tomorrow

Precious is a touring bike completely fitted-out with sensors, capturing data using its Arduino brain and interpretting all of its experiences, combined with a cloud-based system that analyzes those experiences.

Put this all together and get a bike that’s able to express itself in his own words. He shares his up-to-the-moment thoughts and has a subconscious which allows him to dream about all he’s been through.

The bike has been developed by Breakfast and is currently making it’s way across the US to benefit LIVESTRONG®.

I would love my bike kitted-out for a race like this.

Check out the site or follow the bike on twitter to see what’s happening now.

Via Creative Applications

As interesting as it is that a movie about the birth of Facebook is to be released in the UK on 15th October, I’m really looking forward to the Twitter movie

Imaginative fake vintage advertising for Facebook, YouTube and Skype created by Moma agency.

Via flylyf

As one who is always excited by the latest 3D movie offering, I can’t wait to see Toy Story 3. Until I get around toisiting the cinema however, I’ll have to make do with this amazing physics engine developed Thiago Costa. The engine features:

• High friction granular materials
• Incompressible fluids
• Elastic structures
• Plastic deformations & more…

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

Via @fightingmachine

Finally someone has developed a tactile method for sharing data across multiple devices.

I know this is incredibly geeky, but I can’t help but want one.

This is holographic drumkit and turntables test, featuring Beardyman, Will Clark and JFB. I need to see this live!

Neurosonics Live from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.