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Will it be wide enough to land a plane on it?

Shachar

With the worldwide glut of computing power out there, why would you want to spend all that time and effort setting things up in the real world? How long will it be before someone takes the power of BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) grid computing, and the talent of those who made 405: The movie (http://www.405themovie.com/Home.asp) and produce something beyond anything Hollywood has dreamed of?

Or behind you on the freeway: http://www.405themovie.com/Home.asp

Besides, when's the last time you heard of traffic being shut down/diverted for the practice landings?

How do you explain this then? http://www.405themovie.com/

It was called "405: The Movie".
http://www.405themovie.com/

Actually they'd have to lead with 405: The Movie.

I was thinking "girl friends of the guys putting it together" the whole time. Stolen soundtrack and the effects definately had the right vibe. But those two girls (especially the "evil" one) -- yikes.

Kind of neat to see how professional a job this was. Especially the clips where you can see AT-ATs walking behind the real actors. The lightsabers looked right too. I guess the availability of tools for filmmakers on a budget has progressed amazingly. I keep thinking "Flight 405", but looks much better than that.

This tech isn't new. It is the same as was used to make the movie 405 which is freely available for download online. In this short film they pointed a camera on top of a bridge overlooking the highway and took several frames and then spliced them all together so that they could have footage of the highway that looked like there were no cars on it. This is the same idea being used with these glasses, only in real time.

Let's try that 405: The Movie link again.

Ah crap. :( 405 : The Movie. THAT is the link...

Starving artists in the movie industry? You mean, like the ones who made 405, or Batman: Dead End? They're happy they were able to get their content on the net, where it would be appreciated and would demonstrate their talent.

That was an awesome clip. They did a "making of" section on their website which was informative and entertaining as well.

It seems to me that this is very similar to the problems we're having with the recording industry and MP3s.

Their business model has broken and they're trying vainly to simply patch it up by calling in the lawyers and copy-protection gurus instead of addressing the root cause -- lack of value for money.

The same goes with the free-to-air (FTA) ad-funded TV broadcast model. They're losing advertising revenues because technology (TiVo/ReplayTV) is marginalizing their business model. Like the recording industry, they're trying to patch up this shonky model by simply ramping up the intrusiveness of the advertising -- which will have entirely predictable results.

So... here's the solution:

Just as the Net allows MP3 music files created by independent recording artists to be distributed in high quality and at low cost, the use of DivX now allows indie TV producers the chance to get their programming out there at low cost.

Just look at how widely distributed and highly praised the indie 405 movie became thanks to its release on the Net.

Just as in the music industry, there are a lot of really talented producers, directors, actors and effects people out there who might gain significiant benefit when FTA TV finally pushes their luck too hard and really piss off viewers.

I'm sure that most of us would consider a subscription or short (30-60 second) advertisement at the start of each indie movie as a small price to pay in order to enjoy more of great stuff like this -- whilst thumbing our noses at the FTA networks and their lame business model.

The secret to success is realising that an obstacle in your path is simply the chance to climb up and gain a better vantage point.

I don't think that anyone needs to be reminded how sophisticated augmented reality has become. Here's a great (albeit a little dated) example of homebrew special effects involving a jet airliner. Most of you probably saw it a couple of years ago when it was released.

405

405 is also very well done; it was somebody's personal project that turned out to be extremely succssful. They also provide materials that could be useful in a teaching environment.

Flay is a Lightwave-specific site, but they post animations (including 405, above) as they are discovered.

The Internet Raytracing Competition has numerous animations...some of them appeal to you.

The Killer Bean 2.
For style, and improvement over The Killer Bean.
In fact, a comparison between the two would be keen...

Warriors Of The Net.
For an example of how to convey the general idea behind technology in an easy to comprehend format.

And finally, 405.
As an example of how computers don't have to produce things that look like they were produced on computers.

Later,
Blake.

HELL, the first world wide satellite television broadcast included the Beatles singing "All you need is Love". Now we bounce signals around the globe without even considering the magic involved.

Many people living today grew up when a 50-100 mile car trip was something you packed lunch for and spent a day on, not an hour's jaunt costing only a few dollars in fuel. Some of this is due to the fact that we have much better cars these days; a lot of it is that the automobile became pervasive and heavily affected the way society functions.

Telegraphs and telephones are nice, but the form they were in in the 1950s is completely unlike the way modern communications allowed me to leave on a week's notice to spend a month literally on the other side of the planet and not just be in touch with everyone (friends, family, coworkers, random forum participants) so seamlessly that they never had to realize that I wasn't at home. Within 3 hours of getting off the plane, I was sitting in Taipei listening to a radio station at home, answering email and chatting with my roommates, just as we normally did when I was working late and, thanks to IBM.net's generous roaming policy, this cost me a grand total of $0.00.

Similarly - a random individual from the 1950s would be familar with the word "nuclear" but I think perspective has dulled that authors view of how strange that was to all but a few physicists. There's a difference between making a [primitive] bomb and the sort of applications which have become available - nuclear medicine anyone?

And then you get to medicine. Again, while there may be some similar terms, the effect is completely different. Consider the commonplace things - restoring vision, cosmetic/reconstructive surgery, reattaching limbs or organ transplants - all of which are completely unremarkable. There's a major shift in society between the time something becomes possible and heralded as an amazing event and the time much better versions are available everywhere and at a fraction of the cost.

(Note that I'm excluding genetic engineering from that list, as I don't consider it to have reached anywhere near full potential yet. 10 years from now, one the other hand. . .)

Lastly, consider the shift in computers. Yes, the word existed but it's only been in the last decade that they've become pervasive. It's not a case of being used in a few high-end fields like engineering; increasingly it's a fact of life for anything beyond menial labor. There's also a considerable difference between a large company using an early mainframe to store billing records and my being able to carry around many orders of magnitude more power and capacity in my shirt pocket, where it's used to store notes and pull things off of the web. Initially, computers just replaced manual filing systems - there was no equivalent of what can be done today - searching a global network, controlling just about any device, video/audio editing even at the level of even 405 the movie ($10K to do what simply wasn't possible 20 years ago?), all of the different data visualization / manipulation aids, etc. The word "computer" is involved but it doesn't mean what it did then.

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

My problem is that Divx is a crib on MPEG-4 with the usual M$ intention of letting other folks do the work and we will make the money. For all of that, though if it could be hacked/reverse-engineered/etc into something more reasonable for general use, it has some promise. Severe lack of encoders (hey what else only for M$ platorms), but the ones there are seem to run a lot faster than my favorite of Sorenson for Quicktime. A couple of nice links for divx are 405 the movie which is a interesting effort by a couple of guys, here for Wintel encoders and here for a sort of general purpose site.