Friday, May 29, 2015

My Rocket Golf Galaxy is better than yours.

I'm continuing to play Morgan McGuire's casual iOS game Project Rocket Golfing.    The game is fun but from a graphics nerd perspective the coolest thing is that it has unbounded levels.   After the first few Galaxies, you can pick any name and the Galaxy corresponding to that name is next.  For example, I have tried tons of them and the best I have found so far is (really no kidding) "Peter". 
Name a new Galaxy.

There is a crafting system for various power-ups and different Galaxies (each a set of four solar systems) have various resources form none to a lot.  These are indicated by the symbols in the "log" column.  The "Peter" galaxy has four such resource types which is the most I have found in any Galaxy so far.  (Yes I know. I parred only one of four of my own systems so far!)
The Peter Galaxy is resource-rich
 As I said, I have tried a lot of names of people I know (and many variations of my own name like Petey Boy).  I still have not found any mother-load Galaxies.  If you do, please say the name in the comment section (the same name will be the same Galaxy on all versions of the game).

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

HDR is the new new thing

For the past several years I have been helping goHDR man their booth in the futures park of NAB, the siggraph of the broadcast TV tech nerd industry (it fills up the Vegas convention center).  goHDR was the first to my knowledge to have a full HDR pipeline from camera to compressed transmission to display, and that is what got me interested in the company in the first place.  The goHDR booth setup from this year is in this video.

In previous years the industry was obsessed with 4K (what I call 2160p) and the HDR demo got little attention, and my impression was the broadcasters didn't know what HDR stood for.  This year was entirely different as the industry is looking for some new reason to ever buy a TV again.  In my opinion, HDR is more impressive subjectively than was digital, HD, or especially 2160p (I want that for coding, but do not find the entertainment demos compelling).  Only the transition from B/W to color was subjectively more impressive to me than HDR is (yes, sadly I am old enough to remember that).  Scott Wilkinson wrote a nice little piece on HDR at NAB this year and notes that HDR is finally on the horizon.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Some light art at the Albany airport

Waiting for a plane and checked out the art gallery.  It was not only impressive, it appears there are people who like caustics even more than rendering nerds!   The LIT show is detailed on a link here.  Some highlights below.

A moving caustic by Yael Erel

Another moving caustic by Yael Erel

The reflector causing the caustic

A shadow of a tangle of wires by Larry Kagan



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Some wild shadows by Victoria Palermo