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Virtual Skydive
StarEmperor writes: "The folks at Goddard Space Flight Center have created virtual zoom-ins from space to various cities using composites of satellite images."
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It's nice to see technology being used in a neat (if not particularly innovative) way, but is skydiving something we should be promoting?
Skydiving is a dangerous sport. It's a sport completely without merit: why would any sane individual jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Like anorexics who starve themselves amidst an abundance of food, skydivers ought to seek medical attention for the perverse pleasure they seek via this crime against the order of the universe. Like drunk drivers who must spend hours at hospital emergency rooms seeing the actual damage done by drunk driving, skydivers should be forced to spend time with pilots who've suffered catastrophic physical or emotional injuries when bailing out of downed aircraft. Perhaps then they'd repent of their ways.
I admit, it's better that we should engage in virtual skydiving than actual skydiving, just as perhaps at bottom it's better to be engaging in pornographic anime than engaging in actual tentacle rape. But nevertheless, virtual skydiving must inevitably serve as a gateway activity; the thrill experienced during virtual skydiving will soon seem insufficient, and people will switch to harder and more dangerous pastimes like virtual bullrunning and virtual shuffleboard.
What's more, vitual reality is itself a danger: people will lose themselves in virtual worlds and neglect the reality they occupy and the obligations and commitments they have. Children will go hungry as their parents engage in virtual diversions. Debauchery and obscenity will run rampant as people are freed from having to locate actual fellow human beings who share their perversions: pederasty and coprophilia will reach all-time highs as the nation's moral fiber is flushed down the drain like so many digested raisin-bran muffins with cream cheese and a slice of canteloupe.
Will we be able to face ourselves in that world? Or will we be able to tear ourselves free from the grasp of our fantasies and horrors? There's a reason why The Matrix is a dystopian vision of the future: could we imagine living in a world where the pinnacle of humanity's advancement is Keanu Reeves? As the world descends into madness and suffering, who will remind us which pills to take? Will love and compassion melt from our breast like butter on a tin roof or marmalade on a toasted English muffin?
No. A thousand times, no. We must not allow this to come to pass. We must not allow an abomination such as virtual skydiving to commandeer our imaginations and human potential. We must, for the sake of the children, never stop trying to build a world where what goes up stays up instead of plummeting to the ground at a high speed until it's suddenly cushioned by a nylon netting dragging against gaseous atmospheric particles. To fail in this endeavor would be to threaten the very existence of all that is good.
I have seen the enemy and her face is skydiving.
Thank you.
What's really interesting is that the film, made by Ray Eames, was originally commissioned by IBM! Fancy that - IBM, the world's least exciting technology monolith (no pun intended) produces one of the best science films, and best short films, ever made . . . :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
...the movies of zooming in on cities were pretty cool, the real areas that are interesting (and at the same time, saddening) are the animations showing population growth (and the surrounding effects), large lake "seas" drying up, and the deforestation of the rain forest (that big green thing near the equator that keeps the earth habitable, by being a CO2 sink - of course, I would like to see if other areas have increased in forest growth - not necessarily just in the tropical regions - oh well)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Of course, the images are NASA intercepts from Alien transmissions!!!! . My God people, wake up to the charade being played by our government here. Aliens are real! How else could you explain Ted Copple and Barbra Walters?
Someone you trust is one of us.
So if you like this you should check out their site at Art+Com (see this page too).
There also used to be on the web (same people I think) a site which would take their imagery database and build a movie for you of a zoom down onto any point on earth (though I think it usually ended up being Germany).
Another quite impressive version of this I've seen was a demo for the Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality workstation / supercomputer. You could zoom from outerspace down to the Matterhorn but that's not all.. the 2-D image which is already gorgeous in ultra-high resolution (must have been 1920 pixels across) is then dissolved and rotated into an amazing texture-mapped, realistic 3-D mdoel of the mountain. I believe this was taken later and changed so you can keep on zooming through the matterhorn into a MIPS processor inside a Nintendo 64. Anyway it was cool because the resolution was about the same as your eye can handle or better, and more detail kept coming up to the surface. Also the images had been processed and had beautiful color and contrast.
Lastly, there is also Tom Van Sant's own project, GeoSphere. The cloudless earth he assembled painstakingly from Nasa imagery became the best selling photo in Japan and was the basis for his large globe models.
If you are still interested, check out the World Processor by Ingo Gunther. Beautiful globes used to describe the world to earthlings. Oh and another very nice artwork by another friend named Eto-san who used peltier devices to make a realistic temperature scale across a live satellite map in BeWare. Not visual zooming but another sensory dimension for sure. I guess everyone depends on NASA for the real goods!
By Terry Bisson
From "Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories," Copyright © 1994, Tor Books
The SETI website used this copyrighted work with permission from the owners. Did you?
If you were funny on your own, you'd deserve a laugh, or a plus moderation. If you attributed this to its rightful source, you'd be considered witty for juxtaposing the article with the story. As it is, you're just plagiarizing.
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This would have been more impressive if it was posted a couple of weeks ago, before I'd played Black&White, which lets me seamlessly zoom from several thousand feet in the air down to one of my worshipper's nasal hair follicles if I so desire.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
And yet they haven't written one simple law that would prevent the senseless waste of life and equipment that has been caused by skydiving.
Yes they have.
---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
take a look at GlobeXplorer - they have satellite views of everywhere in the U.S., although they're best on the west coast. Try putting your street address in, you might be scared.
The SF zoom is especially impressive because you can see the "coastline fractal" at four discernably different scales. It's much more impressive than the usual demos that rely on still photos at different magnifications.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
the actual technology used by nasa to create the zoom is the old demo scene trick of a number of different scale images scaled down and then expanded to their full size - this can also be done to create a real time fractal zoomer without having to render each frame seperately - just render the frame at double the resolution and zoom in until you hit that frame, in which time you've rendered the next double-size fractal image.
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was 1 2 4 foe i 3 it not 4 5 did grow