#FridayFunFact: VR & AR Are Fast Becoming The Latest Digital Trend (and Next Marketing Platform Target).

James Gates Jr. or Jim Gates, is an African American theoretical #physicist, known for work on #supersymmetry, #supergravity, and #superstringtheory. Education: #MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Field: Physics. Doctoral advisor: James E. Young Books: Superspace: One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry,. Awards: National Medal of Science for Physical Science. The theory that reality, as we consciously experience it, is not real, goes back to the indigenous people who believed that we exist in a dream or #illusion. In our current timeline, we refer to the #matrix, grids, #virtualreality, simulation and hologram. Today many physicists are researching the concept of the universe as a hologram. The universe is a consciousness hologram. Reality is projected illusion within the hologram. It is a virtual experiment created in linear time to study emotions. Our #hologram is composed of grids created by a source #consciousness brought into awareness by electromagnetic #energy at the physical level. The hologram is created and linked through a web, or grid matrixes based on the patterns of #SacredGeometry. The hologram had a beginning and it has an end, as consciousness evolves in the alchemy of time. As the grids collapse, everything within the hologram will end, helping to understand what is going on in the world today. ☕🐸 #YouGonnaGetThisWork #4biddenknowledge CLICK THE LINK IN MY BIO TO LEARN MORE

AR Spatial Audio Recorder

Another smart AR experiment from Zach Lieberman proving Augmented Reality is an interesting creative platform: this one visualizes audio as it is recording and plays back as you follow the path both forwards and backwards:

A post shared by zach lieberman (@zach.lieberman) on Sep 6, 2017 at 5:55am PDT

Quick test recording audio in space and playing back – (video has audio !) #openframeworks 

Link

FontCode

Research from Columbia Computer Graphics Group can create textual encryption by minute altering of font characteristics using neural networks:

We introduce FontCode, an information embedding technique for text documents. Provided a text document with specific fonts, our method embeds user-specified information in the text by perturbing the glyphs of text characters while preserving the text content. We devise an algorithm to choose unobtrusive yet machine-recognizable glyph perturbations, leveraging a recently developed generative model that alters the glyphs of each character continuously on a font manifold. We then introduce an algorithm that embeds a user-provided message in the text document and produces an encoded document whose appearance is minimally perturbed from the original document. We also present a glyph recognition method that recovers the embedded information from an encoded document stored as a vector graphic or pixel image, or even on a printed paper. In addition, we introduce a new error-correction coding scheme that rectifies a certain number of recognition errors. Lastly, we demonstrate that our technique enables a wide array of applications, using it as a text document metadata holder, an unobtrusive optical barcode, a cryptographic message embedding scheme, and a text document signature.

More Here

Virtual Genetic Code

9 Ocean Facts You Likely Don’t Know, but Should

Earth is a place dominated by water, mainly oceans. It’s also a place our researchers study to understand life. Trillions of gallons of water flow freely across the surface of our blue-green planet. Ocean’s vibrant ecosystems impact our lives in many ways. 

In celebration of World Oceans Day, here are a few things you might not know about these complex waterways.

1. Why is the ocean blue? 

The way light is absorbed and scattered throughout the ocean determines which colors it takes on. Red, orange, yellow,and green light are absorbed quickly beneath the surface, leaving blue light to be scattered and reflected back. This causes us to see various blue and violet hues.

2. Want a good fishing spot? 

Follow the phytoplankton! These small plant-like organisms are the beginning of the food web for most of the ocean. As phytoplankton grow and multiply, they are eaten by zooplankton, small fish and other animals. Larger animals then eat the smaller ones. The fishing industry identifies good spots by using ocean color images to locate areas rich in phytoplankton. Phytoplankton, as revealed by ocean color, frequently show scientists where ocean currents provide nutrients for plant growth.

3. The ocean is many colors. 

When we look at the ocean from space, we see many different shades of blue. Using instruments that are more sensitive than the human eye, we can measure carefully the fantastic array of colors of the ocean. Different colors may reveal the presence and amount of phytoplankton, sediments and dissolved organic matter.

4. The ocean can be a dark place. 

About 70 percent of the planet is ocean, with an average depth of more than 12,400 feet. Given that light doesn’t penetrate much deeper than 330 feet below the water’s surface (in the clearest water), most of our planet is in a perpetual state of darkness. Although dark, this part of the ocean still supports many forms of life, some of which are fed by sinking phytoplankton. 

5. We study all aspects of ocean life. 

Instruments on satellites in space, hundreds of kilometers above us, can measure many things about the sea: surface winds, sea surface temperature, water color, wave height, and height of the ocean surface.

6. In a gallon of average sea water, there is about ½ cup of salt. 

The amount of salt varies depending on location. The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, for instance. Most of the salt in the ocean is the same kind of salt we put on our food: sodium chloride.

7. A single drop of sea water is teeming with life.  

It will most likely have millions (yes, millions!) of bacteria and viruses, thousands of phytoplankton cells, and even some fish eggs, baby crabs, and small worms. 

8. Where does Earth store freshwater? 

Just 3.5 percent of Earth’s water is fresh—that is, with few salts in it. You can find Earth’s freshwater in our lakes, rivers, and streams, but don’t forget groundwater and glaciers. Over 68 percent of Earth’s freshwater is locked up in ice and glaciers. And another 30 percent is in groundwater. 

9. Phytoplankton are the “lungs of the ocean”.

Just like forests are considered the “lungs of the earth”, phytoplankton is known for providing the same service in the ocean! They consume carbon dioxide, dissolved in the sunlit portion of the ocean, and produce about half of the world’s oxygen. 

Want to learn more about how we study the ocean? Follow @NASAEarth on twitter.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Marble machine 

Intel Core with Radeon RX Vega M Graphics Launched: HP, Dell, and Intel NUC http://ift.tt/2CQpCuH

Class Zero

math & music

When I was a freshman, studying music, I built my first computer program… and I didn’t even know I was coding:

At the time, I was learning to analyze chords by identifying the individual notes, reordering them into “thirds”, and comparing this stack to the actual arrangement to determine the inversion. I didn’t know anything about programming at the time, but my roommate was an engineer who showed me Wolfram Alpha’s Mathematica, a coding environment useful to a number of fields.

Well, I was just as “screw the rules” then, so I learned just enough to build a sort of decision tree to do my chord analysis homework for me. Above, nested If[] statements determine the interval by calculating the distance between pitches (in half-steps). Below, a similar set-up figures out the inversion of a chord.

There are a bunch of similarities to the JavaScript world I generally live in these days. It looks like Mathematica uses [] brackets instead of () parentheses and {} squiggly brackets, and presents its arguments more like an Excel function, but all the math-y bits certainly work the same… except… I wish Javascript let you string inequalities together like that!

One interesting peculiarity here - I have multiple functions with the same name. Whereas JavaScript functions don’t much care how many inputs you actually feed them, it seems I have different versions of the same keychordtype[] function for different numbers of inputs (defined here with a trailing _ underscore).

And instead of the console.log() message or the alert() pop-ups, outputs are made visible with the MessageDialogue[] function. So even though I don’t have any comments, and my nesting, naming, and order are a bit sloppy (look at those closing brackets! ridiculous!), I can still understand what’s going on - 10 years and several languages later.

tl;dr: music theory is math; different languages have different syntax, but logic is logic; Mathematica has a 2-week trial I’m eating though to take these screenshots

project: chord analysis homework helper

Example-Based Synthesis of Stylized Facial Animations

Graphics research from Daniel Sýkora et al at DCGI, Czech Republic, presents a method of realtime style transfer focused on human faces, similar to their previous StyLit work.

It should be noted that the video below is a demonstration of results, is silent, and the official paper has not been made public yet:

Results video for the paper: Fišer et al.: Example-Based Synthesis of Stylized Facial Animations, to appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics 36(4):155, SIGGRAPH 2017.

[EDIT: 20 July 2017]

An official video (no audio) and project page has been made public on the project:

We introduce a novel approach to example-based stylization of portrait videos that preserves both the subject’s identity and the visual richness of the input style exemplar. Unlike the current state-of-the-art based on neural style transfer [Selim et al. 2016], our method performs non-parametric texture synthesis that retains more of the local textural details of the artistic exemplar and does not suffer from image warping artifacts caused by aligning the style exemplar with the target face. Our method allows the creation of videos with less than full temporal coherence [Ruder et al. 2016]. By introducing a controllable amount of temporal dynamics, it more closely approximates the appearance of real hand-painted animation in which every frame was created independently. We demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed solution on a variety of style exemplars and target videos. 

Link