Light Start – Tetris: The Movie, Trainerbot, Google Art Cam, and Facebook’s 360-degree film
Brett Venter
The Tetris movie is going to happen, and it’s going to be a trilogy?
There’s been a trend of late, of making films out of gaming properties that don’t seem to justify the effort. Battleship got a movie, Asteroids was supposed to get a movie (it didn’t. Yet.) and now Tetris is getting a movie. The flick, according to Deadline, is set to be a American-Chinese collaborative effort which will be filmed using Chinese actors. The film is intended for a global audience and, if we were being honest, if Stephen Chow is involved in any way we’re going to go and watch it. There’s apparently a storyline attached, but we’re mystified as to what it might be but Tetris: The Movie will apparently have a shot at being the first film in a trilogy. Um… wow. Filming starts in 2017.
Go play with yourself with the Trainerbot ping-pong robot
You’ve seen those baseball pitching machines, right? The ones that lob balls at your face at high speed and you’ve got to use a chunk of wood to swat them away? Make that smaller, smarter and able to fit on the end of a ping-pong table and you’ve got Trainerbot, an intelligent, app-controlled ping-pong practise assistant that is now being crowdfunded. It really is quite advanced, letting you program in specific shots, adding spin control, trajectory and direction, so it’s not a whole lot like a baseball cannon after all. The creators are looking for $80,000 and have secured about $14,000 to date. If you’re looking to brush up on your tablet skills then an Early Bird model will set you back $330 (R5,200). If you’re also looking for the stand, you need to pony up R6,000.
Google’s Art Camera is a gigapixel shooter being used to digitally preserve artworks
Did you know that Google has something called the Google Cultural Institute? No? Well, they’ve been working for years on digitally capturing artworks, a process that used to take a considerable amount of time. And that time has just been trimmed down, because the company has come up with what they call the Art Camera. There are twenty of them floating about and what they do is create gigapixel images that can preserve fine detail like brush-strokes. The shot isn’t taken all at once, though. The cameras snap multiple shots, using laser and sonar to get the focus right on each and every bit of a painting, and then stitch the image together to create something insanely detailed, with more than a billion pixels. Selfies, anyone? Er… maybe not.
Here’s the Facebook Surround 360 camera shooting a short film at Grand Central Terminal
Facebook, owners of Oculus, really want you to be immersed in the things that you share. And while their recently-revealed Surround 360 camera isn’t available yet, they’ve given us a look at what it can do by letting you spend some time at Grand Central Station in the States in a short called Here and Now. It gets all emotional, with goodbyes, meetings, arguments and the like taking place and you can pan though all of it. You voyeur, you. Due to embedding issues we don’t have the video here but you can watch it for yourself at the link below. Or you can wait for it to hit the Oculus app. Assuming you have an Oculus Rift. Hey, Facebook, about that…?
