True Bromance Comics: Divided We Stand

True Bromance ComicsTrue Bromance is a webcomic, published every Monday and Thursday. It’s about dudes, bros, werewolves and hos. Seemed pretty obivous. You’re not a dummy are you? I can’t stand dummys.

Tune in every Wednesday for a stale True Bromance comic — or get them fresh from the source Mondays and Thursday.

Hye Yeon Nam: Please smile — or else

please-smile-01

Please smile is an exhibit involving five robotic skeleton arms that change their gestures depending on a viewer’s facial expressions. It consists of a microcontroller, a camera, a computer, five external power supplies, and five plastic skeleton arms, each with four motors. It incorporated elements from mechanical engineering, computer vision perception to serve artistic expression with a robot.

Audiences interact with “Please smile” in three different ways. When no human falls within the view of the camera, the five robotic skeleton arms choose the default position, which is bending their elbows and wrists near the wall. When a human steps within the view of the camera, the arms point at the human and follow his/her movements. Then when someone smiles in front of it, the five arms wave their hands. Through artwork such as “Please smile,” I would like to foster positive audience behaviors.

Body Modification: Man embeds magnets in arm to mount iPod

ipod body mod magnets armAs this fellow starts his countdown to regret we can all marvel at his stupidity. Least he could’ve done is use the magnets as a mount for a pistol or something — but an iPod? Yeesh. At least LCD screens and flash storage mix really well with powerful magnets.

[via DVICE]

True Bromance Comics: Copycat

True Bromance Comics 2012-05-10True Bromance is a webcomic, published every Monday and Thursday. It’s about dudes, bros, werewolves and hos. Seemed pretty obivous. You’re not a dummy are you? I can’t stand dummys.

Tune in every Wednesday for a stale True Bromance comic — or get them fresh from the source Mondays and Thursday.

Phantoms on your desktop


Microsoft has unveiled a new technology which allows two remote users to see and work with shared 3D imagery on a tabletop. The exploratory augmented reality system, tentatively called MirageTable, utilizes curved screens to allow for two-way communications and interaction using digital and real-life objects. This kind of inversion of Jaron Lanier’s virtual reality concept, with the virtual world invading the real world rather than the other way around, was proposed in famous science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem’s magnum opus, Summa Technologiae, as far back as 1964. Perhaps the dream is truly becoming the everyday reality.

Phantomatics appear to be a sort of pinnacle toward which sundry forms and technologies of entertainment converge. There are already houses of illusion, ghost houses, funhouses -Disneyland is in fact one big primitive pseudophantomat. (…) Phantomatics has a certain potential to become an art. At least that would be my initial concession. This could therefore lead it to split into artistically valuable product and mediocre kitsch, as with movies or various types of art.
The menace of phantomatics is, however, incomparably greater than that represented by debased cinema, which sometimes crosses the boundaries of social norms, for example, in its pornographic or sadistic incarnations. For, due to its specificity, phantomatics offers the kind of experience which, in its intimacy, is equaled only by a dream.

–Stanislaw Lem, excerpts from the chapter “The Phantomological Machine” (Summa Technologiae, 1964).

[Source: BBC News]