Eye of Ra Photography is the new online photography gallery of my long lost cousin, Katie McCarley. Well. Okay, she’s not lost. Nobody lost her. We’ve just never met. “Long lost” just sounded better, or anyway I thought so, until I saw the end of this paragraph. Now that I’m here, I’m just not sure any more.

Now that we’ve found her, though, we should be interested in seeing these pictures. They range from documentary protest photos, some of which remind me of my San Francisco days, to architectural and animal photographs (including the only zebra that’s made me laugh and leap, simultaneously) to all sorts of miscellany. My favorite’s this trio of three-legged lucky frogs from a New Orleans voodoo shop. There’s also some digital work, mainly photomanipulation, along with fractals.

Katie’s gallery site is new, but some of these are also available as prints in her Deviant Art pages.

Technorati Tags: photography, gallery, katie mccarley, zebra, frogs, protest, documentary, photojournalism

I’ve just run across this amazing presentation on YouTube – and as I dug a bit deeper, I found that one of the most amazing things about it is that it originated in 1999, to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper by Volker Blanz and Thomas Vetter. It’s not that 1999 is actually ancient history – it’s just that the technology behind this is so very interesting that I don’t understand why it hasn’t already worked its way down to commercial applications (unless it has – but more on that below).

This demo shows how a 3D database of 200 textured male and female faces was used as the foundation for a human face modeling system, and much more – among other things you’ll see how the software uses its raw data to extrapolate a 3D face from a single photograph. It even invented matching textures, whether the photo was in color or in black and white. The same techniques were used to generate expressions for the faces.

In the rest of this post I’m going to muse about what all this could mean. So in the interest of full disclosure I must admit to you that in my last post I mentioned that I was skinning a set of 3D characters, and that skinning characters – without fail - drives me insane. It doesn’t take much of a leap here for you to realize that you are probably reading the thoughts of a crazy person. So make of this what you like.

(more…)

Always.

Has.

Always.

Will.

Days and days and days and days of insanity lie ahead. If you see me, kill me now.

It looks like Thanksgiving will be the time to stock up on a few cases of Slurm and kick back in the Robolounger, because Amazon is now taking pre-orders for the (first!) Futurama movie on DVD.

Yep - the evil Fox Empire did indeed axe Futurama several years ago - but they’ve been so pleased by its sales on DVD that they’ve contracted for up to four direct to DVD movies from Matt Groening et al.

Each of the direct to DVD movies will also be sliced up into separate episodes for airing on Comedy Central (and - one assumes - elsewhere, as time goes on). This first movie is scheduled for a November 27th release on DVD.

“Bender’s Big Score” sends the crew of Planet Express on a time traveling adventure that involves nudist alien Internet scammers, Leela’s love life, and Fry’s buttocks. It is not to be missed.

Technorati Tags: futurama, futurama movie, dvd, matt groening, retro future, animation, comedy, bender’s big score