Yes. Most people can see the difference between 240 fps and speeds below that. Some people can perceive differences up to 360 fps. Note that these values are way above the frequencies that we can detect flicker -- around 75 fps.
I've been doing computer animation for 35 years, as long as it has existed. Back in the early 80's, I worked on some early 60 field-per-second animation; and I was a convert to high-frame-rate footage since then. (The opening to the PBS show NOVA was perhaps the first 60fps animation ever done.) When we started doing broadcast graphics (show openings, things like that) for TV, we naturally did them at 60fps, and that looked right as it worked with the rest of video. Finally, though, we moved into advertising, and TV advertising was (and still is) typically 24fps. And it bothered me!
But then, something changed my mind completely. We were doing an ad for Snacky, a Japanese snack food company. There was the required silly animated spokespuppet, and we modeled it and made it perform. Part of doing animation is doing the lip-sync, and the company gave us the dialogue in English to animate to. We did this, although it didn't seem right -- expecting them to give us the Japanese soundtrack eventually.
But no, it got to a couple of days before delivery, and the character was still speaking English, and we asked the customer when he came to review the work. "This is only going to be shown in Japan, right?" "Oh, yes, yes!", "And you're going to dub it into Japanese, right?" "Of course! Yes!" "But the lip sync is to an English sound track, the lips are not going to match the dialogue!" "YES! JUST LIKE ALL GOOD ANIMATION!"
Because in that day, lip-sync that was correct in Japanese meant it was low-quality domestic animation; where if the lip-sync didn't match it was high-quality American animation. Nobody can tell me that wrong lip-sync is in any way superior -- except that there were 150 million people in Japan who would see it that way instinctively and immediately.
So, I became a happy convert to 24 fps animation. I applaud Peter Jackson for his incredibly audacious experiment, and I hope he succeeds, but he has to fight the near-instinctive reaction from a lot of people who see 48 fps as video.
I think that part of the problem with The Hobbit at 48fps is that the screens are so terribly dark that you just can't appreciate the high frame rate. Your eye integrates dark scenes over a long period of time, and at 48 fps with the very very dark 3D screens, I believe that your eye smears the frames together. On Transformers III, I removed all the motion blur from the very dark scenes, because even at 24 fps they got smeary.
I was traveling from LAX to New Orleans to shoot Bit Momma's House 2 (you remember that, don't you?) After some bad experiences checking baggage, I carried on my supplies, including my tracking kit.
Now, my tracking kit was a small Pelican case filled with watch batteries, short wires, and LEDs. After it went through the X-Ray machine, the TSA agent looked at the screen, looked at me, looked at the screen, then picked up the box. He carefully unlatched it, and held it out *as far as he could* as he opened it, turning his head away and looking through the corners of his eyes.
My personal experience matches yours up until sixth grade, when I was chosen as part of the Study of Mathematically and Scientifically Precocious Youth at Johns Hopkins University. They performed a huge battery of tests on us, and offered us accelerated courses in math on weekends (which was great, because you are right, there was nothing that was at all interesting being taught in middle school/high school). I dropped out of high school after 10th grade (all A's) and entered college at 15.
And got kicked out of college at 18 for being too immature. And going to work for five years, developing some life skills, and going back to college to graduate at the age of 22 maybe a year after my high-school peer group.
It's tough to know what to do with the outliers. These days with the availability of college courses on the internet; I would suggest that these precocious kids should stay in high school taking courses like creative writing and metal shop; learning about life -- and spend half the day taking online courses. Starting college at a very early age is probably not a good idea; although starting college with a great background is.
Yesterday, for example, I opted out of the microwave scanner at Burbank airport. I do this every time I encounter a machine like this, and have the time to still make my flight. I don't do it because I feel they are unsafe (this particular machine is a ambient-microwave imager, it emits no radiation whatsoever) but as a (albiet incredibly weak) political statement -- I feel that if nobody opted out, soon enough nobody would be able to.
I think that ZaaMM is basically autobiography, and Pirsig happened to have an interesting life. And the fact that it was rejected for publication well over 100 times allowed him the time and the incentive to refine it to the point of near perfection. It is my favorite book.
Unfortunately, it's absolutely impossible to get anybody to read a book written back in the mid 70's anymore. I always recommend it to younger people, and have never ever had anybody take me up on the offer.
There's a great book called "A Guide to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that is sort of like the extras on a DVD. It has chapters that were left out of the final book (much better for having been left out!) and a bunch of other supplementary material.
I liked Earth Abides. I can't think of a more optimistic post-apocalyptic story. Yeah, sure, civilization collapses, but people go on a do the best they can. That said, I haven't read the book since it came out 40 years ago.
It reads to me like the author tried hard to think of the best thing that could happen in the three different eras of the book, once he set things in motion with the initial catastrophe.
Inspired by the tapestry on pg 560 of Skylark III I wanted to build a art piece that contained thousands of suspended beads -- as you walked around it, the beads would align into images that could only be seen from that one spot; it would be a random (although attractive) array of colors otherwise.
This work here seems similar, although infinitely more practical and realizable. Very nice work.
I'd like to fly drones over a, say, 100x100 meter area with centimeter precision, possibly indoors, for filmmaking. GPS is clearly not going to work, even outdoors. Time Domain sells a system with 5 cm resolution, using UWB technology -- but is there anything better than that?
There are two cases where triple buffering makes sense:
1) If it takes a substantial amount of time to clear the image. Recall that in double buffering, you are displaying one image while drawing another. When drawing the image, the first thing that is often done is clearing the image to a background color (and depth). On some devices, this took a substantial amount of the frame-time, and adding more memory was cheaper than making the "clear" faster.
2) If it takes more than one, but less than two frame times to draw the image, you can have interleaved pipelines. You are viewing framebuffer 0, mostly completed drawing the image in framebuffer 1, and just starting drawing (with a different set of hardware) into framebuffer 2. When you are done drawing, display framebuffer 1, clear framebuffer 0 and begin drawing, and finish drawing framebuffer 2. Note that this kind of triple-buffering decouples update from latency -- you can get very smooth playback at, say, 120 Hz, but the latency is still 1/60th of a second a best.
Both of these were done when I worked at Silicon Graphics in the early 90's, on machines several orders of magnitude larger than the nexus 7.
I was really surprised to see that this Phantom Eye has a cable-braced wing, that it's not a cantilever wing like every other large-span plane built in the last 80 years. Granted, it makes a lot of sense structurally -- long span cantilever wings have to be built very strong at the root, as the bending stresses are enormous -- but still, it's a surprise to see.
Boeing's Sugar Volt is a proposed hybrid electric/diesel commuter plane with a strut-braced wing -- so Boeing is apparently thinking outside the box on a number of concepts.
I have tremendous respect for Mr Musk and his team at SpaceX. To have designed and built the Falcon 9 and the Dragon, and to have them work perfectly every time, in the short time they had, is an amazing achievement.
On the other hand, this really isn't the first "privately built" spacecraft. Almost all of the "NASA" rockets and spacecraft were built by independent contractors. NASA did a lot of the design work on the Saturn rockets and the spacecraft, but the Redstone, Atlas, and Titan rockets were all designed by private contractors for the military. SpaceX has some advantage in that it's doing everything under one roof (literally).
It is impressive to see that hatch open -- showing the depths of the cooperation between NASA and SpaceX. NASA has to have been working on this almost as hard as SpaceX over the past year to develop the procedures for the rendezvous, capture, and berthing of the Dragon. The opening of that hatch might not be as historic as the Apollo-Soyuz docking of the '70s but it's right up there.
When movies were first made, they were single shots. A train approaching a station, something like that. Audiences oohed and ahhed.
But, the first time a cut was introduced, the audience was completely flummoxed. They had no idea what they were seeing. It's hard to believe that now, but we've probably seen 100,000 cuts by the time we are 5 now, and our brains are rewired to accept it.
I used to fly my lightplane back and forth from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area to my Los Angeles office on the fourth floor of a building in Hollywood.
There was an antenna across the street that looked exactly like the profile of an airplane heading toward us. Whenever I was walking down the hall and would glance out the window, I would see that and immediately, uncontrollably, startle. When you see a plane that close you literally have a second or two to make a decision, and it becomes a reflex to act immediately. Now, walking down the hall of a building no reaction is actually called for; but it didn't stop me from jumping!
The bathyscape Trieste used a similar electromagnet-holding-shot system that Cameron's sub uses. They had a bit of a surprise after many successful dives.
It seemed that the steel shot that they obtained in Europe had a substantial amount of impurities in it; and the system worked just fine. When they filled the hoppers with American shot, though, it was pure enough that the electromagnets didn't just hold the shot, it magnetized it! Even when the electromagnets were turned off, the shot stayed in the hopper.
If I recall correctly (and I read about this 40 years ago!) they were able to dump the entire shot canister to get back to the surface.
The company DDD has built hardware to do this; it "works", after a fashion. It is, indeed, incorporated into a number of recent 3D TVs.
Basically, there are a number of algorithms in the box, and it chooses the one that is most appropriate for a given sequence. If the system sees blue in the top of the frame, it assumes that it is sky, and puts it in the back. If the camera is trucking from one side to the other to generate parallax, it uses that to generate depth. If I recall correctly, there are some 25 different algorithms using motion, color, brightness, etc -- and it indeed does sort of work.
The depth map that is generated is quite coarse (3D conversion can look very good indeed. I was the stereo supervisor for 1/3 of Transformers III, which had both photographed and simulated 3D, and I felt that they were of comparable quality. It was a very non-real-time process, of course!
You don't have to crack the encryption. You can just record and playback the signals from the satellites, with appropriate time delays, at an intensity several orders of magnitude higher than the drone would receive the signals from the satellites.
And when you say "they didn't think through very much", you're off by a magnitude that you (clearly) wouldn't believe. While perhaps the results going against so-called "common sense", the amount of distraction caused by hands-free vs hand-held cellphones is similar and very high -- there have been dozens of studies over the years, and they all reach this conclusion.
The unencrypted communications were probably from much simpler, tactical drones, like the Aerovironment Robin. The more sophisticated drones communicate through satellites for both command uplink and video downlink -- these would almost certainly be encrypted from the very first time.
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Yes. Most people can see the difference between 240 fps and speeds below that. Some people can perceive differences up to 360 fps. Note that these values are way above the frequencies that we can detect flicker -- around 75 fps.
I've been doing computer animation for 35 years, as long as it has existed. Back in the early 80's, I worked on some early 60 field-per-second animation; and I was a convert to high-frame-rate footage since then. (The opening to the PBS show NOVA was perhaps the first 60fps animation ever done.) When we started doing broadcast graphics (show openings, things like that) for TV, we naturally did them at 60fps, and that looked right as it worked with the rest of video. Finally, though, we moved into advertising, and TV advertising was (and still is) typically 24fps. And it bothered me!
But then, something changed my mind completely. We were doing an ad for Snacky, a Japanese snack food company. There was the required silly animated spokespuppet, and we modeled it and made it perform. Part of doing animation is doing the lip-sync, and the company gave us the dialogue in English to animate to. We did this, although it didn't seem right -- expecting them to give us the Japanese soundtrack eventually.
But no, it got to a couple of days before delivery, and the character was still speaking English, and we asked the customer when he came to review the work. "This is only going to be shown in Japan, right?" "Oh, yes, yes!", "And you're going to dub it into Japanese, right?" "Of course! Yes!" "But the lip sync is to an English sound track, the lips are not going to match the dialogue!" "YES! JUST LIKE ALL GOOD ANIMATION!"
Because in that day, lip-sync that was correct in Japanese meant it was low-quality domestic animation; where if the lip-sync didn't match it was high-quality American animation. Nobody can tell me that wrong lip-sync is in any way superior -- except that there were 150 million people in Japan who would see it that way instinctively and immediately.
So, I became a happy convert to 24 fps animation. I applaud Peter Jackson for his incredibly audacious experiment, and I hope he succeeds, but he has to fight the near-instinctive reaction from a lot of people who see 48 fps as video.
I think that part of the problem with The Hobbit at 48fps is that the screens are so terribly dark that you just can't appreciate the high frame rate. Your eye integrates dark scenes over a long period of time, and at 48 fps with the very very dark 3D screens, I believe that your eye smears the frames together. On Transformers III, I removed all the motion blur from the very dark scenes, because even at 24 fps they got smeary.
I was insulted that he thought I would make a bomb that weak...
I was traveling from LAX to New Orleans to shoot Bit Momma's House 2 (you remember that, don't you?) After some bad experiences checking baggage, I carried on my supplies, including my tracking kit.
Now, my tracking kit was a small Pelican case filled with watch batteries, short wires, and LEDs. After it went through the X-Ray machine, the TSA agent looked at the screen, looked at me, looked at the screen, then picked up the box. He carefully unlatched it, and held it out *as far as he could* as he opened it, turning his head away and looking through the corners of his eyes.
Needless to say, I was insulted.
My personal experience matches yours up until sixth grade, when I was chosen as part of the Study of Mathematically and Scientifically Precocious Youth at Johns Hopkins University. They performed a huge battery of tests on us, and offered us accelerated courses in math on weekends (which was great, because you are right, there was nothing that was at all interesting being taught in middle school/high school). I dropped out of high school after 10th grade (all A's) and entered college at 15.
And got kicked out of college at 18 for being too immature. And going to work for five years, developing some life skills, and going back to college to graduate at the age of 22 maybe a year after my high-school peer group.
It's tough to know what to do with the outliers. These days with the availability of college courses on the internet; I would suggest that these precocious kids should stay in high school taking courses like creative writing and metal shop; learning about life -- and spend half the day taking online courses. Starting college at a very early age is probably not a good idea; although starting college with a great background is.
Yesterday, for example, I opted out of the microwave scanner at Burbank airport. I do this every time I encounter a machine like this, and have the time to still make my flight. I don't do it because I feel they are unsafe (this particular machine is a ambient-microwave imager, it emits no radiation whatsoever) but as a (albiet incredibly weak) political statement -- I feel that if nobody opted out, soon enough nobody would be able to.
I think that ZaaMM is basically autobiography, and Pirsig happened to have an interesting life. And the fact that it was rejected for publication well over 100 times allowed him the time and the incentive to refine it to the point of near perfection. It is my favorite book.
Unfortunately, it's absolutely impossible to get anybody to read a book written back in the mid 70's anymore. I always recommend it to younger people, and have never ever had anybody take me up on the offer.
There's a great book called "A Guide to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that is sort of like the extras on a DVD. It has chapters that were left out of the final book (much better for having been left out!) and a bunch of other supplementary material.
I liked Earth Abides. I can't think of a more optimistic post-apocalyptic story. Yeah, sure, civilization collapses, but people go on a do the best they can. That said, I haven't read the book since it came out 40 years ago.
It reads to me like the author tried hard to think of the best thing that could happen in the three different eras of the book, once he set things in motion with the initial catastrophe.
Read "Zodiac", it was originally released under a pseudonym, but is easily found now as a Stephenson book. It's fabulous.
Inspired by the tapestry on pg 560 of Skylark III I wanted to build a art piece that contained thousands of suspended beads -- as you walked around it, the beads would align into images that could only be seen from that one spot; it would be a random (although attractive) array of colors otherwise.
This work here seems similar, although infinitely more practical and realizable. Very nice work.
They are looking for eye donations. Clearly you would be happy with just one.
I'd like to fly drones over a, say, 100x100 meter area with centimeter precision, possibly indoors, for filmmaking. GPS is clearly not going to work, even outdoors. Time Domain sells a system with 5 cm resolution, using UWB technology -- but is there anything better than that?
It's a pretty common idea, really. Wikipedia entry.
There are two cases where triple buffering makes sense:
1) If it takes a substantial amount of time to clear the image. Recall that in double buffering, you are displaying one image while drawing another. When drawing the image, the first thing that is often done is clearing the image to a background color (and depth). On some devices, this took a substantial amount of the frame-time, and adding more memory was cheaper than making the "clear" faster.
2) If it takes more than one, but less than two frame times to draw the image, you can have interleaved pipelines. You are viewing framebuffer 0, mostly completed drawing the image in framebuffer 1, and just starting drawing (with a different set of hardware) into framebuffer 2. When you are done drawing, display framebuffer 1, clear framebuffer 0 and begin drawing, and finish drawing framebuffer 2. Note that this kind of triple-buffering decouples update from latency -- you can get very smooth playback at, say, 120 Hz, but the latency is still 1/60th of a second a best.
Both of these were done when I worked at Silicon Graphics in the early 90's, on machines several orders of magnitude larger than the nexus 7.
I was really surprised to see that this Phantom Eye has a cable-braced wing, that it's not a cantilever wing like every other large-span plane built in the last 80 years. Granted, it makes a lot of sense structurally -- long span cantilever wings have to be built very strong at the root, as the bending stresses are enormous -- but still, it's a surprise to see.
Boeing's Sugar Volt is a proposed hybrid electric/diesel commuter plane with a strut-braced wing -- so Boeing is apparently thinking outside the box on a number of concepts.
I have tremendous respect for Mr Musk and his team at SpaceX. To have designed and built the Falcon 9 and the Dragon, and to have them work perfectly every time, in the short time they had, is an amazing achievement.
On the other hand, this really isn't the first "privately built" spacecraft. Almost all of the "NASA" rockets and spacecraft were built by independent contractors. NASA did a lot of the design work on the Saturn rockets and the spacecraft, but the Redstone, Atlas, and Titan rockets were all designed by private contractors for the military. SpaceX has some advantage in that it's doing everything under one roof (literally).
It is impressive to see that hatch open -- showing the depths of the cooperation between NASA and SpaceX. NASA has to have been working on this almost as hard as SpaceX over the past year to develop the procedures for the rendezvous, capture, and berthing of the Dragon. The opening of that hatch might not be as historic as the Apollo-Soyuz docking of the '70s but it's right up there.
When movies were first made, they were single shots. A train approaching a station, something like that. Audiences oohed and ahhed.
But, the first time a cut was introduced, the audience was completely flummoxed. They had no idea what they were seeing. It's hard to believe that now, but we've probably seen 100,000 cuts by the time we are 5 now, and our brains are rewired to accept it.
I used to fly my lightplane back and forth from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area to my Los Angeles office on the fourth floor of a building in Hollywood.
There was an antenna across the street that looked exactly like the profile of an airplane heading toward us. Whenever I was walking down the hall and would glance out the window, I would see that and immediately, uncontrollably, startle. When you see a plane that close you literally have a second or two to make a decision, and it becomes a reflex to act immediately. Now, walking down the hall of a building no reaction is actually called for; but it didn't stop me from jumping!
The bathyscape Trieste used a similar electromagnet-holding-shot system that Cameron's sub uses. They had a bit of a surprise after many successful dives.
It seemed that the steel shot that they obtained in Europe had a substantial amount of impurities in it; and the system worked just fine. When they filled the hoppers with American shot, though, it was pure enough that the electromagnets didn't just hold the shot, it magnetized it! Even when the electromagnets were turned off, the shot stayed in the hopper.
If I recall correctly (and I read about this 40 years ago!) they were able to dump the entire shot canister to get back to the surface.
The company DDD has built hardware to do this; it "works", after a fashion. It is, indeed, incorporated into a number of recent 3D TVs.
Basically, there are a number of algorithms in the box, and it chooses the one that is most appropriate for a given sequence. If the system sees blue in the top of the frame, it assumes that it is sky, and puts it in the back. If the camera is trucking from one side to the other to generate parallax, it uses that to generate depth. If I recall correctly, there are some 25 different algorithms using motion, color, brightness, etc -- and it indeed does sort of work.
The depth map that is generated is quite coarse (3D conversion can look very good indeed. I was the stereo supervisor for 1/3 of Transformers III, which had both photographed and simulated 3D, and I felt that they were of comparable quality. It was a very non-real-time process, of course!
Delay all the signals by on the order of a few microseconds. Yes, the time would be wrong, but there aren't atomic clocks in those drones. Yet.
You only have to delay the signals a few microseconds. Especially if you slowly ramp up the delays, the drone GPS receiver should track with it.
I'm still guessing that the Iranians are lying here; and that the drone suffered a serious failure and just glided to a landing.
You don't have to crack the encryption. You can just record and playback the signals from the satellites, with appropriate time delays, at an intensity several orders of magnitude higher than the drone would receive the signals from the satellites.
Amazingly, due in large part to efforts of the NHTSA, 2010 had the lowest number of fatalities on the road in 60 years . So, yes, a lot positive has come out of their research and recommendations.
And when you say "they didn't think through very much", you're off by a magnitude that you (clearly) wouldn't believe. While perhaps the results going against so-called "common sense", the amount of distraction caused by hands-free vs hand-held cellphones is similar and very high -- there have been dozens of studies over the years, and they all reach this conclusion.
The unencrypted communications were probably from much simpler, tactical drones, like the Aerovironment Robin. The more sophisticated drones communicate through satellites for both command uplink and video downlink -- these would almost certainly be encrypted from the very first time.