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.
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.
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 WorldWalk-in-Art could use an upgrade.
This is the old world. Click on paintings to see 3D and 360° experiences.
Pretty much everyone loves bubbles when they are kids, but some grown-ups elevate their passion for them to a whole ’nother level.
For example, a physicist at Emory University named Justin Burton and his team made news by publishing an article in a scientific journal about the ideal recipe for blowing giant soap bubbles. Here are links to the scientific article and the story on Ars Technica where I learned about it.
The video from Emory University that was featured at the bottom of the Ars Technica article was okay, but it didn’t have any narration. I wondered if I could find a better one. Sure enough, there were a ton of them. Here’s a really cute one!
Searching for that video turned out to be quite a rabbit hole. There are hundreds of neat YouTube videos about bubbles, and they definitely aren’t just for kids.
For example, here’s a mesmerizing and informative video from the The Slow Down Show YouTube channel that captures giant soap bubbles bursting in slow motion.
It was fun to see and learn about giant bubbles bursting in a controlled setting, but I found myself more drawn to videos of them floating around in the wild.
Here’s 360° video from Dr Zigs that shows a bubble master at work in a field.
Whilst wandering around in the rabbit hole that is bubbles on YouTube, I also tripped across a brief clip by Kevin Casey Fleming that shows the beauty of a bubble freezing along with its surprising demise.
All that was an amusing diversion, but then I got totally enthralled by an artist named Richard Heeks that’s elevated photographing bubbles to an art form. Here’s a link to his Flicker feed.
Finally, there are a slew of “how to” videos on YouTube for anyone that wants to get more involved with bubbles. Here’s one that starts out by explaining why (sadly) you can’t make heart shaped bubbles. On the up side, it describes how to make other interesting shapes as well as a way to touch and play with bubbles without breaking them.
It was an odd way of promoting classical music, but it’s also hard to deny that it was a cool way to virtually experience the London Eye and a view of London’s skyline.
As is always the case, one unusual 360° video invariably leads to another.
If you’re a fan of John Williams and his movie tunes, then you might like taking a side adventure to watch the scads of YouTube videos that show him conducting his greatest hits …
Finally, here is my own little experiment in 3D music fun.
Here’s my Music HeavenToy World. Click on notes to learn about music.
The house is known as the Kalil House, and as is generally the case with Wright houses, there’s an interesting aspect to the architecture. In this case the house is one of seven “Usonian Automatic Houses” that Wright designed. They were intended to be moderately priced and used concrete blocks that could be assembled in a variety of ways.
That sounded like a sort of “LEGO” house, so I wanted to know more!
Interesting concept, but not my personal favorite example of Wright architecture.
However, while I was trying to find out more about how the house looked, something else caught my attention. The website for the sale of the house had a 3D tour.
Neat! Of course, I had to check that out!
That tour was created using a platform called Matterport. The core of their business is that they do a 3D scan of a space and host the 3D model on their platform so users can navigate by simply matching a blue circle attached to their cursor to white circles on the 360° image and clicking.
Matterport is clearly used for selling high-end real estate, but it’s also been used for other types of spaces, and their website has a gallery of interesting tours. The Arts & Culture and Historic sections feature hundreds of great sites. No surprise, I took some (de)tours.
I also accidentally tripped over something else.
There’s another Wright house up for sale, or in this case auction, in October. It’s in Phoenix, and it’s known as the Circular Sun House or the Norman Lykes House.
Once I found that, I decided a try a simple Google Search to find out if there were any other 3D tours of Wright houses
.
Sure enough, there were, which also meant more (de)tours for me!
There was even a tour of Taliesin West, which was Wright’s desert laboratory that was mentioned in the video about the Norman Lykes House.
Then my journey took yet another unexpected turn due to this article.
For all the praise Frank Lloyd Wright garnered in his 70-year career, the architect was equally a magnet for controversy in all its forms. With three wives and eight children (seven biological, one adopted), the architect spent much of his adult life racking up sensational, though not untrue, headlines like “SUIT ENDS WRIGHT ROMANCE; Sculptress Who Fled With Architect to Japan Obtains Alimony” (New York Times) or “ISSUE WARRANT FOR WRIGHT; Architect’s Wife Seeks to Re-enter Their Wisconsin Home” (also New York Times), each referring the personal tumult that seemed to follow the architect through much of his adult life.
Wow, so Mr. Wright wasn’t boring!
I did a tad more research about Wright’s life and found a trailer for a documentary about him entitled Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth & Modernism. It starts out covering his architecture, but it doesn’t end there!
I found out more about the “Murder” in the title of the movie in a YouTube video from the Smithsonian Channel entitled A Horrific Tragedy at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home, but it was so gruesome that I could not bring myself to include anything but a link to it here. I will caution you that you should take the word “horrific” seriously as you decide whether or not to click the link and watch the video!
Finally, on a brighter note, according to an article on Atlas Obscura, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy says that there tend to be between 15 to 20 properties for sale at any one time. These days, a fairly high percentage of those are bound to have 360° tours to explore, so that means that Wright fans can enjoy some new Wright architecture (de)tours with just a bit of clicking.
The beach is actually fairly deserted most of the time — there’s often just myself and a handful of other “beach people” walking or just soaking up some sun.
Here’s a 360° picture that I took which shows what it usually looks like there.
However, things got a lot busier the second half of July because the annual Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival ran from July 26th to July 28th, but the setup and sand delivery actually started happening a week before.
Of course, it’s fun to watch the festivities, and it’s almost impossible to refrain from taking snapshots when something like this happens on your home turf.
Here’s a short slide show of some shots that I took of the festival.
Here are my pictures of my favorite sculptures. Click the gallery for a slide show.
Normally I would have stopped there, but then I got an idea for a project stuck in my head that then took on a life of its own.
You see, as much as I love watching the festival unfold, it also strikes me as bittersweet. It is at the height of summer when preparations start in mid-July, but then the sculptures stay on display for weeks and slowly melt until bulldozers come and wipe them away in mid-August.
To me, the sculptures serve as sort of a metaphor for the short, sweet existence of summer. When they are being built and displayed, summer is in its full glory. Then the crowds leave, the sculptures deteriorate, and by the time they are gone, summer is almost gone too. Schools are starting, Halloween decorations are in stores, and the only thing anyone talks about is Fall.
So, I became obsessed with instantiating this perspective in time-lapses of the sculptures.
For example, here’s a slideshow with photos that I took to create a time-lapse of this year’s Center Sculpture showing its full life cycle from before it was born until it’s demise.
Here are time-lapses of just some of my other favorite sculptures.
There are some more time-lapse videos like these on a longer version of this post that I did for my personal blog From Sand to Sand.
Now, if you’re like me, you think of all of this as being about sandcastles, even though there were no “real” sandcastles this year — the closest thing was the sculpture of Notre Dame.
I admit to being just a tad disappointed that no one decided to build a sandcastle of some sort, even though it probably would have been judged as trite if they did.
That’s why I felt a bit of joy when further down the beach I saw a gentleman building a small, honest-to-goodness sandcastle.
It turns out that he was doing it to promote a cute little product called Create A Castle. Here’s a video about their kit, and there a number of others on their YouTube Channel.
While I was poking around for information about Create a Castle and other related resources for this project, it really dawned on me that building things with sand, or sand art and play as Wikipedia calls it, has evolved from a child’s activity into an industry.
Then, of course, Revere Beach isn’t the only place that hosts sand festivals and competitions — there are a ton of them around the country and the world.
Now that I’ve gotten documenting and sharing the demise of sand structures, I need to get back to work on that project that I’m preparing to release soon.
That doesn’t mean that I won’t be taking a few breaks to visit the beach, though.
Here’s the thing. Summer doesn’t officially end until the Autumnal Equinox on September 23rd. It may be on the wane, but there are still weeks left. Don’t let it go before its time. There is still plenty of time to enjoy some good old traditional warm weather activities like cookouts and visits to the beach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This week I came across something that I thought was fairly unique.
There is a Scottish BMX rider by the name of Kriss Kyle that has elevated his extreme biking into an art. Here’s a video published by Red Bull that starts out with a brief introduction to the young man and then transitions into an artistic performance he calls Kaleidoscope. Stick with it — just when it gets a tad tedious, he introduces a new twist.
The way I first found out about Kyle was by stumbling over this 2 minute featurette that is a “behind the scenes” 360° video about the making of Kaleidoscope. Among other things, he mentions that he had to take motion sickness pills to get through one of his stunts.
As if Kaleidoscope wasn’t “artsy” enough, Kyle was later invited to do a demonstration of his riding inside of a new wing of the Tate Modern Museum. Here’s the museums explanation of the literal publicity stunt.
The Tate Modern Museum were launching a new gallery wing and wanted an exciting, immersive experience to help promote the launch. The agency brought Kriss Kyle, the legendary BMX rider on board to perform stunts through the gallery and showcase the space in a fast-moving 360° immersive experience. — Kriss Kyle@The Tate
Here’s the resulting 360° video that has a distinctly different vibe than Kaleidoscope.
It turns out that there’s another BMX rider with an artistic bent. His name is Danny MacAskill, his work is also sponsored by Red Bull, and his stunts also tend to fall under the category of “don’t try this at home.” Here’s a video of his entitled Imaginate that is a wonderful example of his creativity at work.
MacAskill has also taken his art to great, adrenaline inducing heights. Here’s a video entitled The Ridge in which he returns to his native Isle of Skye to go on a breathtaking and death-defying ride along the Cuillin Ridgeline.
NASA engineers had quite a New Years celebration in 2019 when New Horizons successfully executed a flyby of a tiny object named 2014 MU69 while moving at 32,000 miles per hour.
The planetesimal 2014 MU69 is better known by it’s nickname Ultima Thule, and it’s located way out past Pluto in a region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.
Here’s a link to a video covering the achievement as well as what it has to do with the rock band Queen!
Some scientists may be referred to as “rock stars” from time to time, but it’s seldom literal. It’s also fairly rare for an astrophysicist to be mentioned in Rolling Stone.
Most news stories about Ultima Thule mentioned that it’s the furthest object that’s been photographed. However, New Horizons isn’t the spacecraft that’s the furthest away.
That honor belongs to the twin Voyager spacecraft. In fact, months before New Horizon’s encounter with Ultima Thule, Voyager 2 joined Voyager 1 in interstellar space. Here are a couple of stories abou that feat.
Many stories about the Voyagers mention that they both carry special golden records. Here’s a link to a video that explains how the records were designed to communicate with any aliens that might happen upon them in the distant future.
Believe it or not, there’s even a tie-in with rock ‘n’ roll here, too. The cool scientists that designed the record included a recording of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode!
There was a lot of news about space rocks closer to home around that time as well. That’s because, not just one, but two spacecraft reached milestones in their respective journeys to explore two asteroids.
The biggest news was that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx entered orbit around asteroid 101955 Bennu on New Years Eve. Among other things, this set records for the smallest body ever orbited by a spacecraft and the closest orbit of a planetary body by any spacecraft.
Here’s a video and press release about this milestone that was posted by the OSIRIS-REx Mission on December 31st.
There are many reasons that Bennu is an interesting object, but one of its biggest claims to fame is that it is a “potentially hazardous object” that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table with the second-highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale. The only one with a higher rating is asteroid (29075) 1950 DA (JPL/NASA) (Wikipedia). Neither of these asteroids are very likely to hit Earth, but they are the most likely (that we know of, so far).
That holiday season also brought continuing coverage of Japan’s nail-biting Hayabusa2 Mission to asteroid 162173 Ryugu (Wikipedia). The mission is scheduled to collect a sample of Ryugu and return it to Earth in December 2020.
Here’s a fun bit of trivia. Last summer Brian May also created a 3D stereoscopic image of Ryugu using a picture captured by Hayabusa2.
Of course, almost every story takes advantage of the teachable moment to clarify that it should be called the “far side” rather than “dark side” of the Moon, because it isn’t dark there. There are also inevitable references to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. In fact, when I went searching on YouTube for videos about China’s landing, it served up this trippy 360° video.
I’m sort of sad that it happens to be Pink Floyd’s album that’s getting a bit of play over this, because the more relevant rock music about the Moon is probably David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Notably, astronaut Chris Hadfield paid homage to this by making a music video of it while living on the International Space Station (ISS).
So that’s a wrap up of that wild holiday season in space exploration, and I hope you enjoyed the detours into rock ‘n’ roll, too.
Space Rocks & Happy New Year!
If you want to learn more about the the Solar System, explore this Toy World!
Click the 360° image below to explore it, click the menu in the upper right for controls and click “i” buttons on/off for links to experiences. Use “portals” to visit otherToy Worlds.
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!
If you are a language or communication expert, rock and roll fan or not, you probably have a bit more nuanced response that might begin with the phrase “it depends” and end up including words like perspective and context.
But what do lady bugs think?
Your answer might be who knows … or cares?
Well, it turns out that somebody tried to find out, and the answer is surprisingly relevant as well as entertaining.
Personally, I found it funny that they singled out Willie Nelson as representative of the “not rock and roll” condition. I also couldn’t help but wonder if the ladybugs were just too busy dancing to eat 🙂
Seriously though, the study was actually about an important issue. There really is such a thing as noise pollution, and in some cases, it can be harmful to animals (including us). Here’s a link to an informative video about the impact of noise on humans.
So, that study about ladybugs opinions on rock and roll had a point, albeit an odd one.
However, I’m still not convinced that rock and roll is noise pollution. I lean towards siding with AC/DC on this one, although I must confess to being more on the same page as Joan Jett.
In certain circles it is not uncommon to trip across the debate “Is graffiti art?” You can also find scads about it online if you are so inclined (Google). However, the debate doesn’t come up all that often in the context of conversations about satellites or space… until now.
In 2018 a company named Rocket Lab launched some previously announced satellites from New Zealand. They also launched an unannounced satellite, and more notably, one with no explicit scientific or technical purpose. That satellite was The Humanity Star, and it was a carbon fiber geodesic sphere about 3 feet in diameter that is designed to reflect the sun in order to be one of the most visible objects in the night sky from anywhere on Earth for about nine months. Here’s an article about the satellite, its sponsor, Rocket Lab’s CEO Peter Beck, as well as the message that it is intended to convey.
The satellite was intended to be a relatively short-lived statement of inspiration, but it created quite a stir. Here’s a link to a one minute video about the satellite, its creator and the controversy surrounding the whole enterprise.
The story behind the controversy is that Caleb A. Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia, published this scathing rant about the satellite via Scientific American.
The truth is that if you dig deep enough, there was probably more controversy about this than was warrented. First, while “light pollution” is a serious issue (worthy of an entire post), this particular case of it is a temporary and spurious scapegoat. The same is true about the accusation that it is contributing to the problem of “space junk” since this modest little missionary was designed to follow modern protocols for such things and plunge to its own pre-calculated death upon the conclusion of its short life.
Interestingly, while the satellite probably didn’t deserve the bum rap it got, it did end up serving a higher purpose. It brought attention to the serious, real problem of the massive amount of “space junk” that’s floating around our planet now and the bevy of stuff that is likely to join the ruckus in the near future.
Here’s a two minute visualization generated by Stuart Grey using tracking data from Space-Track.org that shows how space debris has propagated over the last half century.
Of course, the problem of “space junk” in not a new and shiny problem. It has been a growing concern in scientific and engineering circles for decades. Here’s a link to a PSA from the ESA about it.
Here’s a link to a fantastic article from the Washington Post that also provides more specifics about controversial subjects like “collisional cascading impacts” a.k.a. Kessler Syndrome (Wikipedia) and the CubeSats that are especially worrying to some space scientists and engineers.
If you think satellites are cool in general, then you might want to check out an app that Google Earth and Analytic Graphics Inc. made to track the positions of satellites around Earth. You can find out about the app on this blog post.
Leonardo da Vinci sure gets press for a gentleman who hasn’t been around for five centuries! That’s not to say that it’s not well deserved. Here’s a brief video that gives just a glimpse of why he was such an amazing guy.
Of course, one perennial reason for Leonardo’s popularity is the never ending fascination with how he achieved Mona Lisa’s smile. This video is about just one study about it.
Here’s a link to a video that further explains the fantastic techniques that Leonardo used to create the illusions that make the painting so enigmatic.
Unfortunately, it’s hard for an average person to actually experience the effect for themselves. In case you’ve never been to the Louvre and tried to see the original, here’s a 360° Video that will give you a sense of what you will probably encounter (skip to 2 minutes into video).
It is probably no coincidence that Isaacson’s book was timed to coincide with the auction of Leonardo’s last painting in private hands — the Salvator Mundi was auctioned at Christie’s.
The painting ended up going to Saudi Arabian Prince Badr bin Abdullah, and the Wikipedia page about it keeps tabs on its whereabouts and exhibition status.
Good news — Leonardo as Leonardo may be coming to a screen near you! Leonardo DiCaprio, who is named after da Vinci, is going to be starring in a movie about his namesake, and it will be based upon Isaacson’s book.
Given what Leonardo da Vinci himself documented about his own exotic exploits, well, that should be “interesting” — it would be hard to be boring. Okay, it has the potential to be pretty gruesome, but fascinating nonetheless.
If you want to know about Leonardo da Vinci, but can’t wait for the movie, here’s a link to an older documentary.
Finally, for those who are too young to know or too old to remember, here’s a fifty year old pre-MTV flashback by the The 5th Dimension singing the song that inspired the title of this post.
Groovy!
If you like this adventures then perhaps you will enjoy these other posts …
You might think that this event is fairly unique, but it turns out that there are lots of divers who are also fans of the arts, so “arts under the sea” is not nearly as rare as you might think. For example, underwater art museums are thriving. Here’s an article about where you can find your nearest “dive-in” art museum.
There are even some artists who are specifically known for exhibiting underwater. The photographer Andreas Franke once made news by staging an art exhibit on the Vandenberg battleship that was deliberately sunk off the coast of Key West to create the second largest man made reef on the planet (watch the Vanderberg sink). Here’s a 360° video of the exhibit.
The pictures from the exhibit were brought up to create a landlubber’s exhibit. Franke moved on to create an exhibit on the SS Stavronikita off of Barbados, and then he went on to create another exhibit on the USS Mohawk CGC off the coast of Sanibel Island.
Jason deCaires Taylor is another artist who is known for his underwater work, but he specializes in sculpture rather than photography. Here’s a TED talk where Taylor provides insights about what motivates his work.
The eclectic multimedia artist Doug Aitken worked with LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art to construct a large-scale underwater installation entitled Underwater Pavilions off of Catalina Island. Here’s an official video from MOCA about the work.
The current that tends to run through all of the underwater artist’s work is the appreciation and preservation of the Earth’s ocean environments, so please share this to support their work!
Here are links to some other, related posts on Cosma.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
