RoboEarth: More Evidence Of Skynet

Remember the SkyNet like hand we featured earlier this week? Well here is more evidence that SkyNet is upon us.

RoboEarth is a project being worked on by Phillips, the University of Eindhoven, Stuttgart, München, Zaragoza & Zurich. Its goal is to have a central location of instructions and navigation for robots. Robots can then download these instructions and execute them. They have managed to get the TechUnited AMIGO robot to download all the information it needed for a specific task and then carry out the task autonomously.

As you can see from the video, the task was quite simple; serving a drink to someone, but, if I remember my Terminator mythology this is exactly how SkyNet started. Yikes!

RoboEarth: More Evidence Of Skynet originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/02/03.

DIY: Infrared Light Converter

Infrared lights can come in handy. Trying to be discreet when shooting video in a dark place is the first example that comes to mind. Purchasing dedicated IR lights can be very expensive. By using some old floppy disks or a roll of film you can convert an average flashlight or incandescent light bulb to be a very powerful infrared light source.

As you can see from the video above, video passes through the given materials almost flawlessly yet any light source passing through it is almost invisible to the naked eye.

You can find a full write up on the experiment and examples of creating your own infrared lights at lucidscience.com

DIY: Infrared Light Converter originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/02/03.

Wireless Dominoes Fall Without Contact

As a kid I loved creating massive domino chains and knocking them down. I would spend hours laying them out in the living room only to watch them all fall. These “Esper Dominoes” developed by Jarashi Suki and the IAMAS Ubiquitous Interaction Research Group allow for all the same fun, but they use wireless technology to knock the next one down.

As you can see from the video, when one domino falls it wirelessly triggers the next one to do they same. You can build the same old school chain, but they never have to touch each other.

They are currently on display at the Japan Media Arts Festival and I’m afraid to say they might never see the light of day. They were developed over 2 years ago and if they were to have been mass produced and sold, they would have done so already.

[Via Make]

Wireless Dominoes Fall Without Contact originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/02/02.

Is There A Rootkit In The PS3?

There is a nasty rumour floating around the interwebs. Seems that Sony might have very well put a rootkit in the latest rev of the PS3 firmware, 3.56. Granted this is nothing more than a rumour, but less we forget the Sony-BMG rootkit of 2005. Remember when they decided to install a rootkit on everyones machine by way of their music CDs.

The rumour first came to light on the website jailbreakscene.com :

Essentially Sony can now remotely execute code on the PS3 as soon as you connect. This can do whatever Sony wants it to do such as verifying system files or searching for homebrew. Sony can change the code and add new detection methods without any firmware updates and as the code executes remotely there is no reliable way to forge the replies.

Whilst it is possible to patch or remove this code from the firmware this will likely mean the end of playing CFW online (as PSN can just check before login that this is active) or at the very least mean it will be even easier for Sony to detect and ban users.

I can agree with Sony wanting to keep the Playstation Network clean and honest. A lot of people took advantage of the homebrew key hack to cheat their way to the top, but the thought of installing a rootkit to take full control of a machine is crazy.

I hope it’s not true, but I wouldn’t put it past Sony to do something this dirty. I hope someone from Sony is reading this, all you had to do was allow Linux to be run on the PS3 and none of this would have happened.

Is There A Rootkit In The PS3? originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/02/01.

Bing Piggybacking Off Of Google’s Results

Bing just got caught with it’s hand in Google’s cookie jar. Some Google employees decided to create a honeypot of sorts. They found a search term that returned no matches on both Google and Bing, created a “honeypot” page manually that returned results for the term, and they then had a bunch of people click the top link using IE with with Suggested Sites and the Bing toolbar.

Within two weeks a handful of the 100 or so “honeypot” results started to pop up in Bing. So it seems that Bing has decided to take a few shortcuts on the back of Google’s work. Nice one Microsoft.

Bing Piggybacking Off Of Google’s Results originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/02/01.

Nanocade: Netbook Friendly MAME Cabinet

If you have $349 and a spare netbook or mini-ITX motherboard laying around you too can have your very own mini arcade cabinet.

The Nanocade is a kit being offered by designer Rasmus Sorensen. It enables you to use a spare netbook with a 10-inch display as a small tabletop MAME cabinet. With a sweet MAME frontend like mgalaxy, you could have hours of fun play some of those old arcade classics. The price is a bit steep since the kit sans netbook costs more than the actual netbook, but if you don’t have the patience or time to build your own this might be your only option.

Kits should be ready to ship sometime in March.

[Link to Nanocade]

Nanocade: Netbook Friendly MAME Cabinet originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/01/31.

Scientists Develop Terminator Like Hand

Scientists at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center have developed a robotic hand that resembles the hand of the T-800 robot from the Terminator movies. Scarily, the robotic hand’s strength and durabliity is right out of the Sci-Fi franchise.

The hand has five articulated fingers that are powered by a web of 38 tendons which in turn are each connected to an individual motor in the forearm. The robotic hand can control it’s stiffness and the web of tendons allow the hand to absorb violent shocks. So much so that it survived a 66 G impact from a baseball bat.

As you can see form the video above, the hand seems to be able to take a beating. You heard it here first kids, the dawn of SkyNet is upon us.

Scientists Develop Terminator Like Hand originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/01/31.

DIY: EgoBox To Monitor Web Hits

As the owner of a website sometimes you just want to sit back and watch your traffic numbers go up, but to do that you have to stare at your computer screen and constantly refresh your browser. If you want to keep yourself productive and still watch your traffic why not build yourself an EgoBox.

Bogdan’s EgoBox is a standalone ethernet enabled box that displays website hits. The build is simple, an ENC28J60 ethernet control chip access a text file that contains the number of hits and displays them on a seven segment display. Some code is added to the header of the tracked website to increment the number stored in the text file. Very simple and effective.

You can see a full write up on the build and the code that’s used to keep track of the hits over at www.electrobob.com

DIY: EgoBox To Monitor Web Hits originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/01/31.

A Galactic Orb in After Effects

In a new tutorial Galactic Orb, Andrew Kramer builds a zoom animation inside a glassy sphere in After Effects with only built-in plug-ins:

“We’ll start by building the orb using real-life textures and then animate a camera through 3D particles. Timing is everything…”

Quick HUD Element

In Quick HUD Element, Laurence Grayson follows up his De-rezzing your video grunge tutorial with a tutorial on making the HUD element from that video.

The project file and extra tips are on the Shortformvideo website. Here’s the video:

Don’t Get Stranded In Wicked Heat Wave

In this tutorial, we’ll discuss an easy method for adding heat type distortion to an image using particles to drive the displacement rather than the more common method of Fractal Noise. Throw on some shorts and some sunblock… it’s gonna get hot in here!

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .m4v

File size: 22.7 MB

Aetuts+ Photoshop Contest Halfway Over!

This is simply a post to remind you that the Aetuts+ Photoshop Contest is halfway over. I’ve only gotten 13 submissions thus far and remember that we’ll be giving away prizes to the top 20 entries… As of this moment, all 13 are getting $10 free for the Envato Marketplaces… not to mention the other amazing prizes for the Grand Prize Winners!

Check out the Contest!

Charts and Graphs in After Effects

On one level creating and animating charts and graphs in After Effects is easy, but it can get tricky quick if you go much beyond transformed shapes or the Write-On filter. Here’s a few tools and tutorials that may help get you beyond the basics:

Tools

Digital Anarchy Data Animator is now Red Giant Datamator, a full-featured native After Effects plug-in (see some old graphics for a quick overview).
There’s 2D and 3D chart functions in Boris RED and Graffiti.
Another filter for AE & NLEs is StageTools MovingChart.
From 2006, there’s A line chart script for After Effects by Creative Workflow Hacks.
Pie Chart, a custom effect preset by Jorrit Schulte, creates pie charts and has a variety of animation and shading options.

Tutorials

Recently posted by Rob Mize, Graphs and Charts in After Effects shows how to use After Effects to create masks and simple expressions to generate and animate Bar Graphs, Line Graphs, Area Graphs and Pie Charts in 3D space. The styling is spare but techniques are good.
Video Copilot has a tutorial on making Dynamic Bar Graphs: “…we will isolate bar elements from a 3D render to build a customizable bar graph in After Effects. We will use expressions to control time-remapping and link values for the displays. The tutorial is a cool 20 minutes for quick viewing and easy reference for when you get the call…”
Harry Franks uses Radial Wipe in Expression Based Pie Charts (tutorial embed below). See also his 3D bar chart without plug-ins, an AE 6.5 project on AE Freemart.
Alan Shisko explained how to convert animating vertical bars to a pie chart with Polar Coordinates (Rect to Polar) and enhance it in 3D with Zaxwerks filters in Animating 3d Pie Charts.
Awhile back, Mylenium posted Creating Line Charts with expressions (includes AE 6.5 projects). He has a newer free project too, Column Diagram 2.5D.

Adobe Illustrator has a comparatively powerful feature in its Graph Tool, so check out 3D PieChart using Adobe Illustrator by Dave Cross at Layers, as well as No More Boring Graphs EVER and Create Beautiful 3D Graphs and Charts in Illustrator. There’s also Apple Keynote and Microsoft Excel, and a ton of other apps and utilities (eg, Flare) for visualization.

Here’s Making Pie Charts with Expressions by Harry Frank:

Making Pie Charts with Expressions from graymachine on Vimeo.

Omino Python: Python Plug-in for After Effects

David Van Brink (@polyomino) released Omino Python, a free After Effects CS5 plug-in for Mac OS X only (for now) that embeds a Python interpreter:

“This plug-in lets you write a script in Python and then run it on every frame. The script can do drawing, access other layers, and so forth. Because sometimes, you just need to write code to get the job done. Omino Python gives you a straightforward way to provide drawing code directly in your After Effects work flow. This isn’t for everyone; but if you have a little bit of scripting experience, Omino Python should be very easy for you to pick up.”

Visit his blog for even more AE filters and resources.

It’s not the first time Python scripting has appeared in After Effects — Adobe once had a Python Plug-in demo in the SDK and Profound Effects had AE plug-in Useful Things that found fans in Trish and Chris Meyer, Jeff Almasol (with Profound Effects, now on the AE team), and others before it was sold to SONY.

CMG Hidden Gems: Track Mattes

Chris & Trish Meyer’s series of tips, tricks, gotchas, factoids, and shortcuts continue with tips on Track Mattes in CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 11 – All About Track Mattes.

For additional handy info and tutorials, see Track mattes and traveling mattes in After Effects Help and The return of the Set Matte filter at AE Portal.