Try it out for yourself: Flame.

Related posts:

1. NYU to debut gaming degree program next fall

If you don’t know what LastPass is, well, you should. It’s a hugely helpful password manager that has all sorts of plug-ins for different web browsers and mobile platforms. If you still use “PASSWORD123” for every login you have then you should probably consider getting this plug-in and making your life a little less hackable. I’ve used competing products and I have found LastPass to be the most feature-complete and easiest solution.

Related posts:

1. Amazon Mobile Looks Up Any Product You Snap a Picture Of
2. Google urges Web adoption of vector graphics
3. iPhone Makes Up 50 Percent of Smartphone Web Traffic In U.S., Android Already 5 Percent

A review from Gizmodo…

Put simply, Avatar is the most visually fantastic film I’ve ever seen. It will be hailed as the groundbreaking 3D release of its time while setting a new standard by which all blockbusters are measured. Yes, it’s that good.

I’m not going to talk about plot (or that I thought to myself, Dances with Wolves in space more than once). I’m not going to talk about dialog or pacing (or that the limited narration was totally unnecessary). There are other reviews, more reviewy type reviews, that have all that covered. I’m not going to spoil anything, either. Heck, I’m not even going to talk about Avatar…not just yet.

I want to talk about Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park was the first movie I remember being excited to an unhealthily obsessive level. My dad, a huge Michael Crichton fan, did his best to tempt my young self into reading the full-out book. So he told me a sort of good parts version, filling my head with tales of dinosaur resurrection from amber dug up deep in the Earth, all while I would do my best to get more and more out of him without actually having to crack open a book.

So when I heard Jurassic Park was becoming a movie, not only did that dash any chance of me reading the story, but I literally could not fathom a world in which I’d be patient enough to wait to see it (not that I had any other option). I mean, dinosaurs, theme parks, and terror? Jurassic Park was biologically engineered for young boys.

All of this is nice background, but my point is simpler. When I saw those dinosaurs on screen, knowing that, in many cases, they’d been modeled purely by computers—computers!—I felt like anything was possible. Yes, it’s a cliche feeling. That’s actually why I’m sharing it. Because ultimately, we all have that movie—be it Star Wars or Terminator or whatever—that movie we actually felt a bit humbled, even challenged, watching because it was was an amuse-bouche of the future, even if a bit cheesy at heart.

Avatar is that movie for the new generation.

I don’t expect you to believe me if you haven’t seen the film yet. I, myself, was a huge skeptic until a few hours ago. Blue people? Papyrus font?? What the fuck happened to dinosaurs and light sabers and killer robots from the future? Did we use all the cool stuff up?

But about 30 minutes in to the film, you realize that the marketing has undersold the movie. In an era when every great moment of a film makes its way to a trailer, Avatar surprised me with an endless amount of unparalleled optical overload. Every single shot is just so full of detail that you literally open your eyes wider to take as much in as you can before each cut.

Gizmodo readers will love the tech, especially as that about 50% of the film’s budget apparently went to rendering badass 3D curved displays and absurdly awesome cockpits. But sequences from Pandora’s woods at night…let’s just say they’re the first luminescent visual effects I’ve seen that made 1982′s Tron look like a 27-year-old movie.

Also, while shots of the Na’vi (the blue dudes) clearly deviate from a 50/50 balance between real footage and CGI depending on the scene, their body animation, even for motion capture, is unparalleled. While their faces and eyes especially can appear a tad cartoony at times, the overall effect is not done justice by YouTube trailers or that shot pasted above. Call the effect hyperreal or even unreal, but it’s certainly doesn’t look “fake.” I don’t know that I’ve ever witnessed complete humanoid models move so realistically, especially given their exposure (in both screen time and skin).

Of course, Avatar‘s 3D is the basis of my obnoxious zeal for the aesthetics. I viewed the film in a full-sized IMAX theater. And while I knew that a fair share of missiles would fly off the screen (and ZOMG the mechs look amazing), I couldn’t have expected the sheer tangibility that 3D—what I once supposed a gimmick—added to the experience. I mean, I saw textures in this film that I’ve never seen in a movie before, like wet, rubbery skin on the wildcats of Pandora that made people around me gasp more than once. There’s a more understated moment, too, when Sam Worthington shaves and you realize, wow, stubble is pretty remarkable in 3D. The jagged hairs bring a level of humanity to his character, adding something unexpectedly corporeal to what’s really a 30-foot-tall head in closeup.

So yes, 3D is more than a gimmick. The glasses are still a pain, but 3D is here to stay.

Avatar doesn’t handle this new technology perfectly, however, and I hope that other filmmakers learn from its mistakes. Especially early in the film during shots in close quarters, the direction allowed many objects to break frame (think of a person walking from one end of the screen to the other). For my untrained eyes, seeing a figure go from 2D to 3D to 2D was not only distracting, it was tiring. And the same can be said for a constantly shifting depth of field—based upon where the camera is focusing, you’ll need to figure out whether to look deep into the screen or right in front of you.

An out of focus shoulder breaking the corner of the frame is pretty much the worst implementation of 3D I could imagine. Luckily, the forest sequences that make up the majority of the film seemed to have been planned with a wider depth of field—more of the shot is in focus.

After 2 1/2 hours in the theater, I am exhausted far more than the same amount of time playing an FPS would make me, but Avatar was so remarkable that it was well-worth the work of watching it.

I still can’t imagine popping on a pair of glasses to watch the evening news after a long day of work, and I sympathized for the guy sitting beside me as he started rubbing his eyes about halfway through. As someone with a slight uncorrected astigmatism, my left eye was ready to fall out of its socket by the final climactic sequence.

But as viewers, we’ll adapt to the new tech. And as technicians, Hollywood will learn the rules of 3D as it writes them.

So for now, I’m not quite ready to see every piece of the world’s media in 3D. But Avatar? Yeah, I’ll be seeing it again…and maybe again…just in hopes of absorbing a bit more of the visual splendor.

Related posts:

1. 3-D glasses a sticking point for movie industry

The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.

New Web programming standards are hard to nurture, but they do arrive, said Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference.

"First they’re ignored, then they’re hyped, then they’re written off for dead, then they start getting real work done," Neuberg said.

Vector graphics describe imagery mathematically with lines, curves, shapes, and color values rather than the grid of colored pixels used by bitmapped file formats such as JPEG or GIF widely used on the Web today. Where appropriate, such as with corporate logos but not photographs, vector graphics bring smaller file sizes and better resizing flexibility. That’s good for faster downloads and use on varying screen sizes.

But SVG has yet to catch on widely in Web programming circles, in part because the dominant Web browser, Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer, can’t handle them. "It’s hard to deploy this when you can’t use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said.

Google and various allies are working to change that–its Chrome browser along with Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera support SVG–and judging by the arrival of Microsoft as a gold sponsor of the conference, things could be turning around.

Other signs: vector graphics topped the list of desired new features in a Web programmer survey. And that result helped encourage Google to release a preview version of software called SVG Web that brings SVG support to browsers that lack it.

SVG Web can hand off SVG chores to browsers that support the standard. For those that don’t, it runs a Flash program to handle rendering, Neuberg said. "It will never match the performance of native support. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it does help developers and users deploy content," he said.

See the full article at CNET News.

Related posts:

1. Mozilla, graphics group seek to build 3D Web
2. My painfully poky week with IE 8 (Webware)
3. iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service

It’s cool enough to build your own MAME (multiple arcade machine emulator) cabinet – imagine having thousands of classic games ready to play. Mix in a little monster-movie magic and some steampunk styling and you have yourself a fantastic toy, albeit a pretty large one.

The only thing I can think of that it’s missing are some Tesla coils – now that would be a show-stopper!

See the project at Frankencade (via Gizmodo).

Until now, that reality was just a bunch of 2D tags, but with Layar3D it also includes virtual 3D objects. If you have trouble imagining what those might be, just look at the video below. That’s right, it’s Pacman, and it happens in the real world! Of course, the potential uses for this technology go far beyond gaming, but in our geeky eyes, it all boils down to awesomeness (and, potentially, looking very strange as you roam around, looking at the world through your Android phone).

Android embedded 3D

Here’s a bit on how it works: the 3D goodness is created with the help of OpenGL, while the positioning is calculated with the accelerometer, the GPS and the compass of the phone. The application will support live downloading and rendering of 3D objects. These objects will be active, in the sense that you’ll be able to assign actions such as “open link” or “play music” to them.

See the article at Mashable.

Related posts:

1. Bsquare bringing Flash to Android phones
2. Archos’ Android-based MID on track for July?
3. Acer says it’ll "likely" have one Android phone this year

[flickr album=72157617864623406 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

Related posts:

1. Creepy characters — an update
2. Teens Capture Amazing Shots 20 Miles from Earth's Surface With a Balloon

Check out some amazing cupcake designs at My Modern Met!

Related posts:

1. Top 10 Awe-inspiring Treehouse Designs
2. 38 Cute Animals, 1 Cool Screen, 8 Different Uses
3. The World's First Transparent Pool Table

Playing a quick game of automotive-animal word association, you’d probably link Lamborghini to a bull. Between the emblem on the hood, supercars named after famous fighting bulls and the farming roots of the company, the association is well established.

This concept, called the Insecta, the radical concept’s design elements were borrowed from bugs instead of bovines. Combining organic shapes with Lamborghini’s trademark geometric angles, the Insecta concept integrates themes culled from the body armor observed on certain species of insects. With its dimensions and powertrain borrowed from the Gallardo, the Insecta would pack a sting as sharp as its buzz, and it could make a compelling successor to the current LP560-4 – but Lambo would have to drop a load of bull first.

See more photos and the full article at AutoBlog.

Related posts:

1. Tea Bag Lighting Concept is Absolutely Tea-lightful
2. You deserve that scratch on your fender

This bus ad for Fitness First in Rotterdam, The Netherlands gives you the hard sell via shame. It uses a scale in the seat to display just how fat you are to everyone around.

I, for one, would be pretty pissed off if I didn’t know about this thing and sat down to wait for the bus, only to notice people laughing at my weight. It’s an attention grabbing ad, to be sure, but one that might just cross the line into ruining the bus stop rather than just advertising via it. But hey, if it’s getting people to work out at Fitness First, it’s effective.

See the original article at Gizmodo.

Related posts:

1. Door in the floor leads to amazing spiral wine dungeon