Category: Media

Cosma’s Knowledge Lobby!

~ mehopper

Check out Cosma’s brand new Knowledge Lobby!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Here’s a quick backstory about it.

I’ve been “making knowledge a place” for a long time, so at this point Cosma features MANY 3D worlds that enable spatial navigation of the Cosma site and other content on the Web.

Recently I’ve been upgrading my old Toy Worlds to somewhat parallel Web Worlds.

For example, here’s the “Walk in Art” Toy World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was cute for what it was, but limited.

Here is the newer, expanded “Walk in Art & Museums” Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You get the idea.

This Welcome Area is one of the few Toy Worlds that I hadn’t upgraded to a Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It is essentially a 3D version of Cosma’s 2D Showcase page that has links to sample pages, and it has been the primary interface to Cosma since 2018. It was overdue for an overhaul.

Again, here’s the same new Web World as above for comparison.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Notice that there is a (not very well hidden) trap door that leads to another new Web World.

Next year marks a major milestone in Cosma’s development, so I was playing around with what a real life exhibit about it would look like. Then my simple thought experiment snowballed into this elaborate exercise in visualization.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Of course, every object is a visual link to something on the Web.

What better place to put such a thing than below the new Welcome Area, right?

It serves as an extended, visual “About” page.

So that’s the story behind Cosma’s new “Knowledge Lobby” and the cellar beneath it.

Now the majority of my Toy Worlds have been upgraded to Web Worlds.

Although, there are still a few more to go …

Stay Tuned!

Hike, Wander & Walk-in the Web!

~ mehopper

Welcome to Web Worlds@Cosma!

The pages of Cosma have links to many thousands of the best resources on the Web.

Immersive 3D and 360° experiences are among the most valuable types of resources, and so there are links to thousands of them distributed across the hundreds of pages on the Web site.

The Web Worlds@Cosma are thematic 360° images with visual links to a sample of ten to twenty of the best Immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web for a specific subject.

There are many Web Worlds distributed across the pages on the Cosma Web site.

The Web World below is a special one with links to many of the others.

There are hundreds of immersive 3D and 360° experiences to explore!

Click on objects to see 3D and 360° experiences, and click doorways to go to other Web Worlds.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

If you’ve been following Cosma, then you know that Web Worlds have been evolving over the course of the last year. Continue reading below to learn the story behind them.

———————–
New Worlds, Old Ways@MEHopper

The story of Web Worlds began while I was updating my MEHopper Web site last summer.

I had been playing around with virtual home staging software and noticed that some of the spaces looked as if they were generated in the virtual world SecondLife. It was neat to see that “nearly” photorealistic 360° images could be generated and exported from that system.

I’ve used SecondLife to create Knowledge Places for decades, and I knew that it was now possible to take and download 360° photos, but I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet.

I finally got inspired to do it and started with (re)creating my MEHopper Gallery Toy World. Toy Worlds are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniature objects that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting 360° photos are posted on Kuula to overlay links to the Web.

Sure enough, I was able to take a 360° picture in SecondLife and upload it to Kuula to add links in the same way that I had for the Toy World. The result was this new MEHopper Gallery.

Click on the pictures to read posts about when and where they were taken.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Web Worlds@New Media Museum

The experiment was successful enough that I decided to try my hand at another one.

This time it was for a space for my New Media Museum Web site. I had experimented with making virtual museums using my own museum’s content, but this time the goal was to create an interface to other computer museums.

This goal also inspired me to resurect my idea of “Magic Doors” from my work in SecondLife. You can read about the history of them on the Knowledge Objects page.

M.E.Hopper's Magic Window in SecondLife 2006
M.E.Hopper's Magic Window Farm in SecondLife 2006

The result of this experiment was the Computer Museums Lobby below, and you can read the story about why this came about in this post on my New Media Museum Web site.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, objects to learn about them, “i”s to learn about the museums, and doors to enter the virtual museums.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was around this time that it dawned on me that Web Worlds was a good term for describing the 3D interfaces that I was creating in SecondLife and Kuula to make visual links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web. I did some research and found that the term had been used to describe virtual worlds on the Web before, and so I decided that it was the right term to use for what I was doing.

———————–
Web Worlds@Cosma

It wasn’t long after the term Web Worlds stuck that I decided Cosma needed some of them.

One major goal of Cosma is to have 3D interfaces for spatial Knowledge Navigation of the resources on Cosma and other Web sites. The history of this work is on the Worlds page.

There are currently a series of Toy Worlds that serve as 360° visual interfaces for the major content areas of Cosma. There is also a Cosma Welcome Area Toy World on the front page of Cosma that has links to the others.

However, there are some content areas that don’t have Toy Worlds. That’s because I never got around to making them, and this has bugged me for awhile. Web Worlds struck me as a way to remedy the situation.

The idea of “Magic Doors” as links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences came in handy, too. I’ve been adding links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the pages of Cosma for about five years, and there are thousands of them distributed across the Web site. Unfortunately, few people notice them because the links to amazing experiences blend in with more mundane links (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Courseware, JSTOR etc.). I decided that Web Worlds with visual links could be a way to bring more attention the links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences.

I happened to be updating the Transportation pages, and it was one of the content areas with no Toy World. I also happened to have tons of cool objects in SecondLife to use for the job (Cars, Trains, Boats, Planes etc.). It wasn’t long before Transit Paradise was born.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

One limitation of my approach to making Web Worlds reared it’s ugly head, though.

You can only cram so many doors and objects into a single 360° photo.

This result was that there wasn’t enough room for all of the Transportation content, and I decided that Space Transportation needed to go into a separate Web World.

I was also updating the Space pages at the time and decided to address another weakness. While the existing Solar Extremes Toy World was a fine interface for the Solar System pages, there were some pages related to Astronomy that weren’t included in it.

Ultimately Space Transportation and Astronomy were combined into Space Depot.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Soon after that I was working on the Library page and saw experiences there begging for attention. The Great Libraries Antechamber resulted, and the post Little, Big, Old, Spooky Libraries explains more about it.

———————–
Hike the Web!

November 17th is National Take a Hike Day, and I planned a post to highlight some virtual hikes on the Web. A Web World with doors to those and some parks seemed like a nice idea, and so Hiking Trails Hall came into being.

I was also updating the pages in the Nature section of Cosma around that time, and I thought it would be good to make Web Worlds to emphasize the links to experiences quietly lurking about on those pages.

For example, there were links to 3D tours of Natural History Museums on the Dinosaur page, and so a Web World for accessing Natural History Museums seemed like a “should do.”

The Plant, Flower and Tree pages had links to some lovely Botanical Gardens, so Botanical Gardens Orangery was an obvious choice for another Web World.

There were many links to fun experiences on the Animal pages that needed attention. I also happened to already have some very cute animals in my inventory in SecondLife, so Critter’s Hollow was a no-brainer.

Finally, I created this Nature Center to integrate and access the four separate Web Worlds and introduced it in the Hike the Web post.

Touch doors and objects to enter 360° virtual experiences, touch “i”s to learn more, and touch arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Beach Bum Break

Then came January, in New England, and this year was worse than usual! 🙁

I’m a hopeless “beach person.” That’s why there’s even a Beach page on Cosma.

I couldn’t go visit beaches with warm weather, so making Enchanted Beach Hut, Enchanted Beach Shack and the Enchanted Beach House below were therapy. You can read about it in My Enchanted Beach Houses post.

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters and objects to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It turned out that my beach adventures weren’t just therapy — they also inspire the design of the largest Web Worlds creation so far …

———————–
Wander the Web@Wanderlust!

Later in January I got busy slogging through updating and expanding the “World” pages (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Antarctica and their many children).

Years ago I made an arm-chair Travel Lounge Toy World. It was okay, but it didn’t showcase many immersive experiences.

In fact, there were so many links to fantastic experiences on the pages that I was updating, a single Web World wasn’t going to be enough. There ended up being six Web Worlds (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Antarctica).

Notice that I loved my Enchanted Beach House so much, I repurposed it for all of them. Then, as with the Nature Center, I made a central Web World to access the others. Voila! The result was Wanderlust Travel Villa!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Walk-in-Web

Earlier in February, after the extravaganza that was Wanderlust, I wasn’t sure that I would be up to making more Web Worlds any time soon. Then I was updating the Arts & Entertainment pages and realized a few things.

First, I don’t spend nearly enough time on them, and I don’t add that content to the other pages as much as I should either. I need to fix that.

Second, my earlier Walk-in-Art Toy World was kind of pathetic, and it didn’t have links to great art museums that you can visit on the Web.

Of course, that just wouldn’t do at all, so welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums.

Touch the art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
One World to Rule Them All

After reading the story above, I hope you can see why I needed to make a single Web World to access the others. It became too unwieldy to find all of the Web Worlds distributed across the Cosma Web site, and old fashioned text links to them would be too boring and not in the spirit of why I made them.

I hope you enjoy using Web Worlds@Cosma to Hike, Wander and Walk-in the hundreds of 3D and 360° experiences that you can find through Cosma Web Worlds Welcome Area!

Enjoy!
— M. E. Hopper

Walk-in-Art & Museums!

~ mehopper

Last week I wrote Enchanted Beach Houses where I explained how I was inspired to create the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa. It’s a “virtual travel” application with a visual interface to over a hundred 3D and 360° experiences.

In case you didn’t see it, here it is again.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You can use the above interface or these posters to visit all seven “Web Worlds.”

           

One thing that I regretted was that I couldn’t include more 3D and 360° experiences.

There just wasn’t enough room in the Villa to link to the hundreds of experiences that I’ve included on the pages on Cosma.

For example, I had to decide whether to include the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre?

I ultimately decided to leave off the Louvre.

That means that there are links to virtual experiences on the page about France on Cosma that are not in the Europe Room in the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa.

Here are examples of experiences that you will see links to on Cosma that are not in the Villa.

Virtual Tours (Louvre, Official Website)
Louvre Museum (360 Stories)
The Louvre Museum a 360° Experience (Escape Now, YouTube 360° Video)

I found myself leaving out a lot of museum experiences, and I was particularly sad to leave out experiences for some of the greatest art museums. That’s why I decided that this old Toy World Walk-in-Art could use an upgrade.

This is the old world. Click on paintings to see 3D and 360° experiences.


You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Now welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums!

Touch art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Here are links to some other, related posts on Cosma.

Walk-in-Art
Art Revisited
Dive-in-Art
Leonardo Lately
Magical Paintings
Into Van Gogh

Enjoy, but beware, it’s easy to get lost in 360° art!

Find out more about the visual arts and museums …

Into Van Gogh

~ mehopper

It’s not unusual for one artist’s work to serve as the grist for another artist’s mill. However, few artists have their works “reimagined” as frequently or as creatively as Vincent van Gogh. Artists all over the world are still very much into making works based upon his iconic paintings.

For example, check out this surreal 360° video of a hot air balloon that’s a faithful 3D reproduction of Van Gogh’s famous Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

DiscGolfVR360 (YouTube Channel)

Here’s the article with more background about the ballon.

Giant Hot Air Balloon with the Face of Vincent van Gogh Sails through the Skies of Melbourne (Adam McCleery, Daily Mail Australia)

There is also an exhibit at the Atelier des Lumières in Paris that invites attendees to walk “into” Van Gogh’s Starry Night and other works. Here’s a one minute promo.

France 24 (YouTube Channel)
France 24 (Official Website)

That clip was a good introduction to the exhibit, but it didn’t convey the atmosphere of the experience as well as this next clip featuring Don McLean’s Vincent.

Ine RP Braat (YouTube Channel)

If you’re sad that you can’t step into that Starry Night exhibit, then let me introduce you to some artists that strive to take you “into” Van Gogh’s Starry Night via YouTube videos.

The first one of these types of videos I ever saw was this one by Robbie Dingo from 2007. He used SecondLife to “build” the painting, and then he filmed it.

Share Festival (YouTube Channel)

Here’s a link to Robbie Dingo’s post about the video.

Watch the World(s) (Robbie Dingo, Digital Double)

I also came across this 360° video with a similar mission in 2016.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Motion Magic (YouTube Channel)

Then I found this awesome 360° video in 2018.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Youtube Trendz (YouTube Channel)

The highlight of that clip was going into Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, which is one of his works that’s been “reimagined” almost as often as Starry Night.

The Art Institute of Chicago had quite a bit of fun with “recreating” that painting when they were promoting their exhibit Van Gogh Bedrooms. They went so far as to create a replica of Van Gogh’s bedroom and then list it on Airbnb. Here’s a story about how thousands of people got into van Gogh’s bedroom.

Art Institute Re-Creates Van Gogh’s Bedroom to Rent on Airbnb (Corilyn Shropshire, Chicago Tribune)

Alas, that opportunity is no longer available, but you can step into this 360° video now.

Rendr (YouTube Channel)
Rendr (Official Website)

That video is actually a recording of a 3D model that Sokolovsky Ruslan posted on Sketchfab.

His model was also used to create a “virtual door” into Van Gogh’s bedroom with the augmented reality app ARLOOPA. Here’s a short clip of users stepping into the painting.

ARLOOPA (YouTube Channel)
ARLOOPA (Official Website)

Finally, the above examples have gone hand-in-hand with some creative uses of technology, but now here’s a fun low-tech take on Starry Night by YouTube sensation FlippyCat.

FlippyCat (YouTube Channel)
FlippyCat (Facebook Page)

Here are links to some other, related posts on Cosma.

Walk-in-Art
Art Revisited
Dive-in-Art
Leonardo Lately
Magical Paintings
Walk-in-Art & Museums!

Enjoy, but beware, it’s easy to get lost in 360° art!

Find out more about visual arts and media …

Furby Hacking

~ mehopper

It’s odd how some toy fads come and go as one hit wonders while others seem to stick around and take on a life of their own. Of course, there’s no question that one of the oddest toys with the longest track record is Hasbro’s Furby.

Whether you’re a Furby lover or hater, you have to admit that they’ve got staying power. Perhaps it’s because they give the illusion that they do have a life of the their own, but personally I believe that it’s because of the wide variety of mischief that they can support.

Treating a Furby as a “starter” pet has a certain amount of charm. That’s probably why there’s a ridiculous number of Furby videos on YouTube that feature things like them talking to Siri and dancing Gangnam Style. It’s right up there with cat and dog videos.

However, if you’ve owned a Furby, then you know that the real fun doesn’t begin until you get two or more of the critters together. Then they really carry on. Here’s a party of 20 of them chattering away to each other.

Jared Bendis (YouTube Channel)
Jared Bendis (Official Website)

That trick will entertain kids for a bit, but it’s certainly not the main source of attraction.

That honor most certainly must go to the “hackability” of its personality. While parents may encourage their children to be responsible and take Care of Furby, their off spring are inevitably going to explore how to Turn Furby Evil.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Furby personalities, here’s a short demonstration of the difference between a good and bad Furby (complete with burps).

besttoysguide (YouTube Channel)

Here’s a commercial that plays on the idea.

FurbyOfficialUK (YouTube Channel)

Here’s a 360° video that shows that when you get a group of evil Furbies together, things can get really scary. It also shows that you can find a 360° video about almost anything as well as that there’s some very odd stuff on YouTube (as if you didn’t know that already).

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Max Deacon VR – Hella Rad Toys (YouTube Channel)

That video was actually about a game entitled Tattletail that takes the concept of evil Furbies to a whole ‘nother level.

Furbies Get Their Own Horror Game with Tattletail (David Gelmini, Dread Central)

Now if you think that this post is going to stop at someone hacking together a Furby coven, you’re wrong. There are far more extreme Furby hacks out there.

For example, one father and son duo took the concept quite literally, and this resulting “longish” video is surprisingly gruesome.

What’s Inside? (YouTube Channel)
What’s Inside? (Facebook Page)

Then there’s another guy who decided to transform his Furby into an Amazon Echo that he then dubbed Furlexa. The video of how he did it is shorter than the last one, it squeezes in a ton of Furby history, and it has a lot more details about Furby innards. Oh, and we also get to find out if Furby is flammable.

Howchoo (YouTube Channel)
Howchoo (Official Website)

Furlexa strikes me as sort of creepy in all sorts of ways, but here are instructions on how to make one if you’re into that sort of thing.

I turned a Furby into an Amazon Echo. Introducing: Furlexa

Finally, my award for best Furby hacker goes to an artist named Sam Battle that frames his work under the moniker Look Mum No Computer. He engages in a niche practice known as circuit bending to create things like a Furby Organ.

Here’s a feature video and article about his work by Dani Deahl from The Verge.

The Verge (YouTube Channel)
The Verge (Official Website)

Circuit bending: Hacking a Furby in the name of music (Dani Deahl, The Verge)

If you’re inspired to hack a Furby, or other toys, here are some links to get you started.

6 Amazing Terrifying Toys that have been Circuit Bent (Steve Aoki)
Intro to Circuit Bending (Joseph Thibodeau, Hack a Day)
Circuit Bending For Beginners (David Erik Nelson, Performer Magazine)
Simple Ways to Circuit Bend a Toy (Instructables)
How to Circuit Bend (WikiHow)

If you want to learn all about how Furbies came about and keep on succeeding, check out this neat article.

The History Of Furby, The Electronic Pet That Took The Late ’90s By Storm (Lucia Peters, Bustle)

Happy Furby Hacking!

Find out more about toys and robots…

Creepy Old Bots

~ mehopper

Before there were robots, there were automata.

Automata are old-fashioned robot like contraptions, and they tend to make the news from time to time.

The latest example is a 360° video featurette from the BBC about The House of Automata. Here’s a link to that video.

The Strange Dolls That Come to Life (BBC Global)

Personally, I find the creatures like the ones in that video a bit creepy.

It turns out that I’m not alone. Here’s a whole video about creepy automatons.

Slapped Ham (YouTube Channel)

The thing I find even creepier than the bots in the video is what people paid for them!

It must be an acquired taste.

While many automata of a certain age tend to be kind of creepy, some aren’t so bad. In fact, they come in all shapes and sizes, and some of them can be quite pretty as well as fascinating.

A great place to see that as well as to learn about automata is at the Morris Museum in Morristown, NJ. That’s because Murtogh Guinness, of Guinness beer fame, was an avid collector of automata and their close relatives, mechanical musical instruments. He left his entire collection of more than 700 gadgets to the Mooris Museum.

Here’s a video and link about that motherload of automata.

The Midnight Archive (YouTube Channel)
The Midnight Archive (Official Website)

Musical Machines & Living Dolls: Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata from the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection (Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ)

Here’s a link to the history of Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s lovely artists mentioned in the video.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s Writer, Lady Musician and Draftsman (History of Computers)

While it doesn’t always make the news, there is a surprisingly large community of fans of both old and new automata. There’s even a yearly AutomataCon at the Morris Museum.

Find out more about automata and bots in general …

Magical Paintings

~ mehopper

Two earlier posts on Cosma entitled Walk-in-Art and Art Revisited covered a trend for new immersive 360°/3D/VR technologies to be used to revisit and add new dimensions, literally, to classic art masterpieces. Some examples covered in those posts included three-dimensional reimaginings of van Gogh’s Starry Night, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium explicating Bruegel’s A fall with the Rebel Angels and the Salvador Dalí Museum’s experience entitled Dreams of Dalí: A Virtual Reality Experience that allowed visitors to use a VR headset to step into Dalí’s painting entitled Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus..

Now there’s a new, fantastical twist on reimagining classic paintings on the block.

Remember those nifty magical paintings in Harry Potter where the people in the paintings move around, interact with people in other paintings as well as people in the real world? (Muggles’ Guide to Harry Potter)

Well I’ve just stumbled across a 360° video that takes the concept to a whole nother level. There’s nothing else to say that doesn’t spoil the fun, so just watch and be sure to look around!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

SoKrispyMedia (YouTube Channel)
SoKrispyMedia (Official Website)

That’s just awesome I had to share it!!!

Here are links to some other, related posts on Cosma.

Walk-in-Art
Art Revisited
Dive-in-Art
Leonardo Lately
Into Van Gogh
Walk-in-Art & Museums!

Enjoy, but beware, it’s easy to get lost in 360° art 😉

Find out more about the visual arts …

Méliès Doodled!

~ mehopper

You’re almost certainly familiar with Google’s Doodles. They’re an excellent, entertaining way to spend some time learning something new, in passing, every day. They also almost always point to some little known, but interesting backstory. Today’s Doodle is a particularly beautiful example of that. It celebrates Georges Méliès, and it is special for many reasons.

One reason is that it’s Google’s first Doodle that’s a 360° video. Here is a link to see it.

360 Google Doodles/Spotlight Stories Back to the Moon (Google Spotlight Stories, YouTube)

If you’re reading this after the Doodle’s gone, then check out the archived version of Celebrating Georges Méliès. As always, it looks better if you increase the video quality to the highest level that your viewing device will support, and you might need to watch it a few times through to catch all of the action and detail.

The video is fun on its own, but it is guaranteed to send cinema history buffs over the moon. If you don’t happen to be a cinema history buff, then it will take a bit of explaining to help you see why the Doodle is SO awesome. However, I’ll confess that, having taught cinema history at MIT and then other places in Boston over the years, it’s hard to know where to begin. It could easily be a semester long course, but here’s the shortest version I can manage.

The best place to start is with explaining why Georges Méliès was so special. Here’s a mini-documentary I use to introduce him. It’s kind of hokey, but it gets the job done.

DYnazty (YouTube Channel)

If you happen to have seen Scorsese’s Hugo, then you’re already way ahead. That movie was a tribute to cinema history in general as well as Méliès specifically. Here’s a review by that explains the myriad of ways that is true.

Jack’s Movie Reviews (YouTube Channel)
Jack’s Movie Reviews (Twitter)

By the way, here’s Hugo’s fantastic introduction to cinema history.

TheAOL102 (YouTube Channel)

It can’t be done any better than that! Now that you’re up to speed on Méliès and his role in cinema history, here’s a link to a “behind the scenes” look at how the Google’s Doodle, Spotlight Stories and Arts & Culture Teams collaborated with Cinémathèque Française (Wikipedia).

Behind the Scenes Back to the Moon (Google Spotlight Stories, YouTube)

This isn’t the first time that Google collaborated with Cinémathèque Française to create a 360° video celebrating Méliès and his role in cinema. Here’s a link to a video where the Google Arts & Culture Team also worked with them to create a piece entitled Kinoscope.

Kinoscope – A Virtual Reality Journey into the World of Cinema (Google Arts & Culture, YouTube)

The video was created in conjunction with the exhibit The Cinema Machine: from Méliès to 3D that ran at Cinémathèque Française. The show is no longer there, but here’s a nice review.

Critic’s Notebook: Exploring the Nuts and Bolts of Filmmaking at the Cinematheque Francaise (Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter)

You can also see Cinémathèque’s Collection on Google Arts & Culture.

Finally, as a bonus, here’s another interesting 360° video clip I stumbled across that shows the history of VR in movies in a VResque format.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Raging Cinema (YouTube Channel)

Find out more about cinema and art in general …

The Beach

~ mehopper

One long term goal of Cosma is to include an entertaining, interactive and immersive 3D Interface. There are already “demos” of what that might look like, but none of the available technologies are ideal, so there is no full implementation of the vision (yet).

The most recent demo is a fun little Toy World that started out as an experiment in using a 360° image as a “previs” tool for a full implementation in Unity3D.

Click on objects to find out about them.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Stay tuned for more fun experiments soon!

Find out more on the Worlds and Worlds Challenge pages …

See also Beach, Lighthouse and Sandcastle

Perspectives on Earth

~ mehopper

Last week NASA released this fascinating video entitled Our Living Planet based upon 20 years of data from satellites that observe all plant life at the surface of the land and ocean.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

You can find out more about the video from this article.
The Changing Colors of our Living Planet (NASA)

Of course, releasing fantastic imagery like this is nothing new for NASA — they have a long and illustrious history of sharing iconic imagery to amaze and inspire people around the world.

The most famous image NASA ever shared is the photo known as Earthrise. It was taken by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, and it was the first time a human ever saw the whole earth from space. Here is a video about the image that was released in 2013 on the image’s 45th anniversary.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

The next most famous image from NASA is probably The Blue Marble. It was taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. Here is a NASA video from 2015 that discusses the original image as well as newer imagery captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory.

ScienceAtNASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA Science (Official Website)

These two images may be the most famous, but thanks to Carl Sagan, none has been more inspirational than the Pale Blue Dot. It was captured by Voyager 1, and here is a video of Sagan unveiling the photo in 1990.

The Planetary Society (YouTube Channel)
The Planetary Society (Official Website)

The press conference was inspiring, but it was actually the language that Sagan later used to frame the image that truly captures the imagination.

CarlSaganDotCom (YouTube Channel)
Carl Sagan (Official Website)

Of course, NASA continues to share awesome imagery from time to time. For example, back in 2012 they released Earth at Night. It is also sometimes called “The Black Marble,” and it is an animation of Earth’s city lights assembled from data from the Suomi NPP satellite.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

NASA also ran a campaign for Earth Day in 2014 that generated the Global Selfie.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

NASA has already released numerous 360° Videos related to other planets, so it is only a matter of time before they release an explorable 360° image or video of Earth. In the meantime you can enjoy this 360° Video created by the Opaque Media Group to promote their VR application Earthlight.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Opaque Media (YouTube Channel)

Find out more about Earth …

Art Revisited

~ mehopper

Artists have revisited, reinterpreted, and in more recent terminology, “remixed” earlier artist’s work for as long as there has been art. Happily, this trend is alive and well, and new immersive 360°/3D/VR technologies are being used to revisit and add new dimensions, literally, to classic art masterpieces.

Here’s a link to an earlier post where I showed how artists experimented with allowing viewers to experience entering van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Walk-in-Art

The latest example of this type of thing to cross my screen is this YouTube 360° video from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium explicating Bruegel’s A fall with the Rebel Angels.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (YouTube Channel)
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Official Website)

Great stuff, and it is in good company. There is a growing list of examples of famous works being reinterpreted in creative new ways. For example, last year the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg (FL) held an exhibit entitled Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination.

That exhibit featured an experience entitled Dreams of Dalí: A Virtual Reality Experience that allowed visitors to use a VR headset to step into Dali’s painting Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus.” Here is a video and article about the VR experience.

CNET (YouTube Channel)
CNET (Facebook Page)

Explore a Salvador Dalí Masterpiece in Virtual Reality (Lulu Chang, Digital Trends)

This video is a preview of just the Dreams of Dalí VR experience.

Goodby Silverstein (YouTube Channel)
Goodby Silverstein (Official Website)

Finally, and most importantly, here is the 360° video of Dreams of Dalí.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

The Dalí Museum (YouTube Channel)
The Dalí Museum (Official Website)

While it is probably going too far to say that “remixing art” using various three-dimensional techniques is a “killer app” for new immersive 360°/3D/VR technologies, it is at least an interesting trend to celebrate.

Finally, here’s my own little fun 360° experiment with “walk-in-art” that I made as part of a series of Toy Worlds for Cosma. Click on paintings to walk into them!

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Find out more about the visual arts and media …

Lions, Tigers & Bears…

~ mehopper

The advent of360° cameras brought a plethora of 360° videos about animals.

Many are conservation oriented like these about lions and tigers.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

METAVRSE (YouTube Channel)
METAVRSE (Official Website)

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano VR (Official Website)

National Geographic is a prolific producer of them. Here is a link to an example.

Swimming With Bears in 360° (National Geographic)

You can find a ton more great 360° videos from National Geographic on YouTube!

One company even showcased their professional cinematic VR cameras by producing this video that was Sundance worthy.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Condition One (YouTube Channel)

Finally, YouTube even created a very nice channel called The Animal Point of View full of neat 360° animal videos.

They are endlessly educational and entertaining — enjoy!

Find out more about animals …

Walk-in-Art

~ mehopper

New media artists tend to revisit and reinterpret earlier artist’s work, sometimes intentionally and with attribution, and other times not so much. Either way, it’s interesting to compare (re)implementations. For example, here’s a 360° video I just tripped across that experiments with the idea of allowing the viewer to “walk-in” van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Motion Magic (YouTube Channel)

It is interesting to contrast that video with a relatively well known work made ten years ago by Robbie Dingo. He used SecondLife to “build” the painting, and then he filmed it.

Share Festival (YouTube Channel)

Here’s a post about the artist’s post about the video written back in 2007.

Watch the World(s) (Robbie Dingo, Digital Double)

Both works are engaging, and the fact that the newer artist also chose van Gogh’s Starry Night, with or without awareness of Dingo’s earlier SecondLife work, creates an interesting contrast.

Find out more about the visual arts and media …

AirPano

~ mehopper

While reviewing the posts during “the move,” there was one glaring omission that emerged. It turns out that there was never a post about a fantastic Russian crew going by the name “AirPano” that has been traveling the world using drones to capture and publish fantastic 360° panoramic videos, and they have been doing it since before there were 360° YouTube videos. As soon as there was such a thing, they were doing that, too. It was very remiss to not “Spotlight” their work before this. Here’s their boiler info. off of their YouTube channel…

“AirPano is a not-for-profit project created by a team of Russian photo enthusiasts focused on taking high-resolution aerial panoramic photographs. Although we usually photograph from a helicopter, we also like to shoot from an airplane, a dirigible, a hot air balloon, and a radio-controlled helicopter. Today AirPano is the largest resource in the world — by geographical coverage, number of aerial photographs, and artistic and technical quality of the images — featuring 360° panoramas of the highest quality shot from a bird’s eye view.”

So true, so true, they are definitely not exaggerating. Check them out!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Here’s a great article about them!

A Cut Above the Rest: Stunning Drone Photographs Capture the New Seven Wonders of the World Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before (Becky Pemberton, Daily Mail UK)

Find out more about them!

AirPano (Official Site)
AirPano (YouTube)
AirPano (Facebook)

Find out more about the world…