Weekly Round-up (Week of 7/13/08)
Last week was an amazing week for web development. If you haven't heard about these cool new projects, here's what you've been missing out on:
The first thing I saw last week was Scott Schiller's amazing Experimental dynamic XBM test, favicon "VU meter". He put his very useful Sound Manager 2 flash API to interesting use: the favicon displayed in many browsers' tabs and other places is a VU meter of the current song playing. Awesome! So, using that cool premise, what other neat things could be done…
Enter Mathieu 'p01' Henri's super cool DEFENDER of the favicon! This unbelievable game is confined in a tiny 16x16 box, just big enough for your favicon! You can also hit Enter to transfer the game into a canvas element on the page. So creative, so retro, so cool! I've already spent way too much time playing this game, much to the misfortune of my poor squinting eyes.
Last but never least is the always impressive Jacob Seidelin with another mind-blowing demo of what JavaScript is capable of in the right hands. I'm sorry if it's tiring that I keep reposting what Jacob is up to, but as long as he's doing incredible things like this, it's not gonna stop.
You may have already heard about Radiohead's new video hosted on Google Code. If not, here's the gist of it:
No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.
Awesome right? Well Jacob saw this as a challenge from Radiohead and did what he does: implemented it in JavaScript and canvas. As usual, super cool stuff.
Well, this week's almost over, so here's to hoping that next is half as cool as last week was!