Earlier this year I worked on an experimental sci-fi short film, “Memoirs of a Spore” (Chapter I, The Rains).
Plot Summary: Once in a long past future, a cyborg ponders their rehabilitation in a metabolic society ravaged by the war, continuous rains, and other artifacts.
I’ll appreciate your feedback.
Concept and Editing: Ashutosh Nilkanth
Visuals: Luigi (BuzzerWorks), Kevin Nelson, Michelle (Loonachic)
Music: Osvaldo Cibils
Sound: R Humphries, ERH
I’ve been reading a lot about “Augmented Reality” lately. Just the other day, I saw this beautiful short film titled ‘World Builder‘, that also depicts this powerful holographic technology to express the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds.
Augmented Reality (AR) is basically the combination of real-world video imagery and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. The GE Smart Grid demo uses AR (must watch the video). It’s a fascinating technology, and I think it has a lot of potential in the consumer space as well.
Some startups (like Layar and Wikitude) are already developing AR geo-interfaces (GPS based) for mobile phones, which would allow anyone to simply point their phone camera in open space (say a market-place in a new city you are in), and get a location-based interactive perspective (say the landmarks, ATM’s, or pubs near you) through dynamic recognition.
Zugara’s Augmented Reality & Motion Capture Shopping Application (demo video) is also a neat example of things to come.
Nokia has also been building this technology on more than a decade of academic research into mobile AR. Nokia researchers have been working on real-time image-recognition algorithms as well; they hope the algorithms will eliminate the need for location sensors and improve their system’s accuracy and reliability.
One day, in the genuinely not so distant future we will live in two worlds; reality and augmented, neatly combined into one.
Further Reading:
Ready for another Slumdog Millionaire? After Vikas Swarup’s Q & A was made into Slumdog Millionaire by Danny Boyle, it’s the turn of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize winner The White Tiger. The book’s rights have been acquired by Revolutionary Road producer John Hart’s newly formed Smuggler Films.
I read through an interview with Aravind Adiga, and found some of his thoughts on the book’s development quite interesting. Some excerpts:
[The book] came out of my experience of coming back to India. I grew up in the south; but I returned to the north (Delhi), after having lived in Australia, and studied English literature at Columbia University in New York and Oxford University.
As a correspondent for Time, I traveled a lot in places I hadn’t seen before, like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar. The book is a record of a discovery of a new side of India.
The first thing that came to mind that I had forgotten was the servant-master relationship, the class system in India. Especially in north India, even today, a middle-class person is well off and can have three, four servants, a driver, a gardener, someone to take care of the children.
The other thing that struck me is the disparity in income. The rich are so rich. The Indian economy is booming but the money was not really getting down to the poor and the difference in the world between the rich and the poor was phenomenal.
And this led to the question why there was so little crime in India compared to that in New York, South Africa and Latin America, where poverty is the leading cause of [the high rates of] crime. In India, even if there is a phenomenal disparity in wealth there is very little crime due to poverty. The novel began as a kind of an experiment.