Tag: lighting

Apple’s iPhone 8 and 8 Plus wrap more power in a glass-backed design

Apple is likely to announce more phones than any event in its history. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are two major parts of today’s showcase, and after all those tantalizing leaks, we finally get to hear all about them. After all the leaks, and anticipation, you thankfully won’t have wait much longer to handle one: both iPhone 8 models will go on preorder September 15th, with a launch date of September 22nd. For the bigger handset, you’ll get to pick storage configs from 64GB up to 256GB, while iPhone 8 shoppers will get 64GB and 256 GB options. So how about the cameras? The iPhone 8 has a 12-megapixel camera — it’s a new sensor with a new color filter, while the iPhone 8 Plus, with its dual camera, gets a duo of 12 megapixel sensors. Notably, the wide-angle lens has a f/1.8 aperture, while the telephoto one now has f/2.8. What would a new Portrait Lighting, still in beta at the moment, will separate your portrait from the foreground, analyse the lighting and add a different effect as wanted. The effect will be generated on the fly — it’s not a filter per se, but generated by the iPhone itself.(Don’t worry, you’ll also be able to tweak these later, after taking a shot.) Video gets some love too: faster frame-rates for both iPhones, as well as image and motion analysis. The pho Developing… Follow all the latest news from Apple’s iPhone event here!

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Apple’s iPhone 8 and 8 Plus wrap more power in a glass-backed design

Disney’s projection tech turns actors’ faces into nightmare fuel

Disney is taking scary clown makeup to the next level. It’s using a new projection system to transform the appearance of actors during live performances, tracking facial expressions and “painting” them with light, rather than physical makeup. Called Makeup Lamps, the system was developed by a team at Disney Research, and it could potentially change the way stage makeup is used in future theater productions. Makeup Lamps tracks an actor’s movements without using the facial markers common in motion capture, then it displays any color or texture the actor wants by adjusting the lighting. It can make someone appear older by creating “wrinkles” on their face, for example, or it can paint their face in creepy clown makeup, à la Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight . And all of it is done in real-time. A similar technology was used earlier this year during Lady Gaga’s performance at the Superbowl. Nobumichi Asai, creative director of Japanese visual studio WOW, was brought in to create a red lightning bolt on Gaga’s face during her David Bowie tribute. The attention that performance received has helped the technology become more mainstream. Latency — the time between generating an image that matches the actor’s pose and when the image is displayed — is a big challenge to live augmentation, of course. Large amounts of it will cause the projection and the actor’s face to appear out of sync. Disney’s research team combated this problem by limiting the complexity of its algorithms and employing a method called Kalman filtering, which uses measurements over time to make predictions and minor adjustments. “We’ve seen astounding advances in recent years in capturing facial performances of actors and transferring those expressions to virtual characters, ” said Markus Gross, vice president at Disney Research. “Leveraging these technologies to augment the appearance of live actors is the next step and could result in amazing transformations before our eyes of stage actors in theaters or other venues.” Source: EurekAlert

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Disney’s projection tech turns actors’ faces into nightmare fuel

LED lights could get better with self-assembling particles

LEDs have dramatically transformed the lighting world over the past few years, thanks to their increased efficiency and life-span over past technologies. But LEDs could see even more upgrades with perovskite particles, a self-assembling nanoscale material that could make them even more efficient and cheaper to produce, Physorg reports . Researchers have already shown how perovskites could improve solar cells, but until now it was difficult to create uniform films made out of the material. “Our new technique allows these nanoparticles to self-assemble to create ultra-fine grained films, an advance in fabrication that makes perovskite LEDs look more like a viable alternative to existing technologies, ” said Barry Rand , an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton and the lead researcher in the findings. Basically, this bodes well for the future of LEDs. It could eventually make it easier to developer LED panels for TVs and monitors, or drive down the cost of LED lighting. Lighting using the new technology are superior in many ways to old-school incandescent bulbs, or even slightly more modern fluorescent bulbs, but they still cost quite a bit more than the older competition. Via: Physorg Source: Nature

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LED lights could get better with self-assembling particles

Watch Rope Get Made From a Tree Using a Thousand-Year-Old Technique

Making rope is hard. Making rope the way the Vikings did it over a thousand years ago is even harder. First, you have to find the right tree. Then, you have to strip the bark of the tree when the sap is rising. And then, you soak the bark you just harvested in the sea for three to four months before you can even think about turning it into rope. Read more…

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Watch Rope Get Made From a Tree Using a Thousand-Year-Old Technique

Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

Ars visits The Coalition in Vancouver, BC. Video shot by Sam Machkovech, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link) VANCOUVER, BC—The future of high-end PC gaming is looking good thanks to graphics APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan , which let game engines more directly access multi-threaded processes in your hungry gaming computer’s CPU and GPU. As of right now, however, neither API has been heavily tested in the public gaming market. Vulkan’s biggest splashes to date have included noticeable, if incremental, bumps for games like Dota 2 and this year’s Doom reboot, while DX12 has been applied to PC versions of existing Xbox One games—meaning that we’ve seen those games jump up to impressive 4K resolutions, but we haven’t seen similar jumps in geometry or other major effects. This fall, Microsoft is finally taking the DX12 plunge with a deluge of ” Xbox Play Anywhere ” game launches, including this week’s Forza Horizon 3 , but arguably the biggest DX12er of the bunch is October’s Gears of War 4 . I wouldn’t have made that statement before game developer The Coalition unveiled the game’s DirectX 12 version for the first time, but after seeing what the company had to offer, I was amazed. Here, finally, was a Gears of War game that looked as stunning as the original did during its era—you know, so long as you can afford the game’s “recommended” PC build spec. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

The Commodore PET Has Been Reincarnated As A Phone

 The 1980s are back again! The guys who bought the Commodore name are releasing an Android smartphone for about $300. The price includes some bog standard specs but, most important, includes two emulators so you can play classic 1980s games right on your screen. The phone will appear in Europe first – including Italy and Poland – but if you remember programming guessing games in… Read More

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The Commodore PET Has Been Reincarnated As A Phone