Video Making

Say hello to Matt Richardson!

Say hello to Matt Richardson!

Everyone please give a warm welcome to Matt Richardson! He’ll be making videos and posting here at Make: Online. Matt is a long-time sci-tech lover and maker. In his childhood, he wrote computer games in BASIC and then as a teenager he worked as a science demonstrator at The Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. […]

Kinect 3D holographic video chat

Kinect 3D holographic video chat

Kinect hacker Oliver Kreylos and pals are using a couple of Microsoft Kinect 3D game controllers and custom software to enable 3D holographic video chat. Their setup differs from traditional 3D video in that the participant is captured and mapped in real-time allowing others to view them from any angle in 3D. One fortuitous outcome of this experiment is the ability to clearly identify the line of sight of the other participant.

The real-world origins of some of your favorite Star Wars sounds

I remember seeing the old footage of Star Wars sound designer and foley artist Ben Burtt, banging on a steel radio tower guy wire with a crescent wrench to record blaster-sounds, from a TV documentary when I was like five years old. Which is one of the reasons I thoroughly enjoyed this video interview with him, in spite of the fact that it’s part of a puff video for Lucasfilm’s new book about Star Wars sound effects. Click the embedded player to be taken straight to Ben’s interview at 1:05. [via Gizmodo]

200 countries, 200 years, 120,000 data points, 4 minutes…

…and a pretty sweet Minority Report-esque dynamic infographic (“infomotion?”), to boot. The point? The world today has more than its share of problems, but we can all be thankful it isn’t the world of 200 years ago.

The charming Swede is Hans Rosling–physician, statistician, and host of BBC 4’s The Joy of Stats. Pretty much everything about this video makes me happy, not least of all that the Brits have a TV program celebrating statistics itself. [Thanks, Dad!]

P.S. If you’re feeling cynical, check out the equally-cool-but-way-less-uplifting Animated Map of Nuclear Explosions, 1945-1998 by Isao Hashimoto.