This week, gamers learned the sad news that Atari filed for bankruptcy in the US. True, most of us likely haven't played an Atari game in decades, but the retro 8-bit look will never go out of style!
Naturally, no one is more upset about this than Conan O'Brien, who'll miss what could've been if Atari had made current pop culture legends into fast-paced games. Watch Harry Potter, Frodo, and James Bond get the pixel treatment below.
Much of our day is spent on the computer — IM'ing friends, playing games, working, posting photos on social media — and Polaroid Cacher wants to immortalize the best of those fleeting moments.
The concept camera is a screenshot come to life, bringing the instantaneous photo printing of Polaroid and the digital experience together.
Polaroid Cacher from Adrià Navarro on Vimeo.
In the video, we see a Google Chrome browser plug-in that works as a screenshot would. A viewfinder appears and the user can toggle the lens around and adjust the zoom. After taking the snapshot, Polaroid Cacher wirelessly prints the photo, using a vintage Polaroid Land Camera and a custom laser-cut enclosure.
Designer Adrian Navarro is rethinking cameras and made a presentation on his background research for the Polaroid Cacher project. He discusses repurposing vintage cameras in ways that are efficient, commercial, and fit in with today's visual culture.
What do you think about an analog format for your digital experiences? Innovative or excessive?
Coding is a jumble of number and symbols — but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful. The Art of Creative Coding, which originally aired on PBS, explores how programming has gone beyond utility and become an art form.
Artists use programming languages to create interactive displays and exhibits, pushing the limits of what is possible in computer programs. The new art form is called "creative coding" and is made accessible through open-source platforms and libraries that help artists "skip the nitty gritty" of coding and focus on artistry. Does this video inspire you to get coding?
Sit back, wee hobbit fans, and let me tell you a tale. It's set a long time ago in the psychedelic '60s in a place called Hollywood, with a magical man named Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy was known at the time for entertaining young and old alike on TV as a half-human/half Vulcan called Spock, who safeguarded the galaxy aboard a ship named the Enterprise.
When off the set, Leonard created an album called the Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, on which he sang about our fabled J.R.R. Tolkien hero, Bilbo Baggins. A mod music video was even made for this ballad of Bilbo Baggins, complete with groovy dance moves, which we present here today. Prepare for "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" with this vintage video.
On his 30th birthday, Cesar Kuriyama quit his job and started creating a viral video — he just didn't know it yet. The project was an ambitious one: to record a moment every day for the rest of his life.
He cut footage from the first year of his undertaking into a film, and the result was this remarkable six-minute-long video collage. Most of the recordings were shot on an iPhone 4 or 4S (with an Olloclip ($70) for the fish-eye scenes), and the rest were filmed on a Canon 7D, Lumix Z53, and GoPro HD.
1 Second Everyday — Age 30 from Cesar Kuriyama on Vimeo.
The project had such a positive impact on Cesar's life that he launched a Kickstarter campaign to turn his idea into an app called 1 Second Everyday that stitches one-second-long videos into a continuously evolving movie. The app accesses your camera roll and compiles the footage for you, then sends a daily reminder in case you forget.
Since it's still in development, 1 Second Everyday isn't available on the Apple App Store or Google Play just yet, but if you're really curious, preview screenshots from the app after the break.
Sunita Williams is awesome for three reasons: she's a NASA astronaut, the commander of Expedition 33 to the International Space Station, and the record holder for the longest space flight by a woman. Oh yeah, and her hair. Spread out your fingers really wide and take a look — that's what Suni's locks look like. In space. (!!)
Earlier this month, the commander took the Internet on a tour of the Russian segment including Zarya, the first part of the International Space Station launched in 1998. In the video, we get a good look at Zvezda, the central command post where astronauts gather during an emergency, like fire, depressurization, a toxic atmosphere, or an ammonia leak. There are also two Russian flight engineers floating in the background brewing coffee (black).
Check out more station tours hosted by Suni at NASA's multimedia gallery. Get the inside scoop on the crew's sleeping quarters and hygiene station, the Destiny, Kibo, and Columbus labs and the Quest airlock, and the cupola, the station's observation deck.
Steve Mahan really wanted to go to Taco Bell, so that's exactly where Google's Self-Driving Car took him. Steve is 95 percent blind, and as this video goes to show, it's people like him that could really benefit from those driverless Priuses that have been getting some buzz. For Steve, simple errands, like picking up a Crunchwrap Supreme or running to the grocery store, are huge tasks, but the self-driving car affords him "independence and flexibility" — and that's pretty amazing.
Google started the project in 2010 to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient. Self-driving cars have already photographed hundreds of thousands of miles for Google Maps Street View, and now they're even legal in Nevada and California.
The experimental technology plays an important role in helping Google Maps reflect true road conditions, and as you just saw, it could change the lives of many visually impaired and handicapped people. Self-driving cars still need to pass rigorous technical and safety tests before they can hit the market, but until then, we'll be watching this video on loop.
Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, curling up with leftover stuffing and watching some awe-inspiring videos sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Well, we've unearthed stunning, beautifully crafted films that feature everything from time-lapses of the night sky to an autistic artist who draws entire skylines from memory.
These visual wonders are a small sample of the artistry on Vimeo, whose robust filmmaking community seems to grow by the day. The video-hosting site launched Creator Services earlier this year to help support the creative endeavors of filmmakers and producers, so we only expect more amazing online flicks in the future. Until then, sit back and enjoy the best of what Vimeo has to offer right now. You also might want to grab your charger, because you'll be here a while.
Carl Sagan was a fierce advocate for the natural sciences, as well as a prolific astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and, well, we'll just stop there, because this list could go on all day. He once wrote, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology,” and he made it his lifelong mission to make sense of it all.
Sagan would have turned 78 today, and in honor of the science philosopher's birthday, we're sharing The Voyagers. It's a touching short film by video artist Penny Lane, about the Golden Record, a mixtape of images and sounds from Earth compiled by Carl Sagan that was sent aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, NASA's 1977 unmanned missions into space.
Continue on to watch the incredible short film.
Both mission control's emotional celebration and Mohawk Guy's big debut made the Aug. 6 landing of the Mars Curiosity rover an Internet blockbuster — but what's happened since? Today at 1p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT, the folks of the Mars Science Laboratory Project are presenting what Curiosity has found so far on its mission to investigate whether Mars could have supported life.
Watch the live feed of NASA's update on the rover's first three months and the Mars Science Laboratory Project's two-year prime mission, after the break.
