TECHNOLOGY

3D Facial Animation Demo By Pendulum Alter Ego Award winning animation studio Pendulum shows a demo of compelling and emotive digital characters from AlterEgo, their facial performance division. AlterEgo demonstrates how they accurately translate an actor’s facial performance into believable and life like 3D character animation..

Mythbusters Draws Mona Lisa Using Paint Balls MythBusters first showed how aCPU drew a smiley face one paint ball at a time and then proceed to show how a GPU used parallel processing to draw an actual Mona Lisa drawing in 80 milli seconds. Add a slow motion version at the end and you get a sensational technologydemonstration.

Future Of Robotics – Self Assembly Robots

This is a view of an early prototype of using a swarm of robots that could physically join and create a three dimension artificial organism. The robots would manage their own hardware and software and even self heal when damaged.

There are ambitious aims to how the technology could be used where these robots would be used to solve tasks too complicated or dangerous for human such as deploying them in collapsed building.

Mars Phoenix Lander CG Animation

An animated illustration of the Phoenix Lander arriving on Mars on May 25th. The Phoenix Lander is programmed to set down near the North Pole of Mars and over the next three months, sample alien soil and ice and look for conditions conducive for ancient microbial life.

This animation shows the arrival, deployment of parachute, jettison its heat shield, thruster fire, landing, unfurling its solar panel, deploying its instruments, scooping and analysis by the Phoenix Lander.

EuphoriaCharacter Animation Engine: This is a demo of Euphoria’s realistic character animation system which is used for the animation tech in Grand Theft Auto 4. It doesn’t require an animator to generate all possible movements and uses a combination of artificial intelligence, physics and biomechanics. This is truly the future development of character animation.

Antonov – The World Heaviest And Largest Jet:

The Antonov An-225 is the world’s heaviest and largest jet for strategic airlift transport built by Antonov Design Bureau. It is larger than the Airbus A380 airliner and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest airplane. It has a landing gear system of 32 wheels and a wing span of 291 feet and designed for the Soviet space program in 1988 to airlift the Energia rocket’s booster, Buran space shuttle or ultra-heavy and oversize freight up to 250,000 kg internally or 200,000 kg on the upper fuselage.