The virtual world is getting more realistic. New animation advancements in true-to-reality rumpling of clothes and face reddening are pushing us closer to the event horizon of the Uncanny Valley.
The first advancement is an algorithm designed to give animated clothes life-like wrinkling and crumpling while you are besting that orc. While more realistically rendered clothing won’t increase your manna, it may make digital effects in the next Matrix movie even better, New Scientist reports:
“This is exactly what people like me want,” says Andy Lomas, a software developer who produced digital effects for the film The Matrix and is based at computer graphics firm The Foundry in London. “I want to be able to capture the fundamental nature of an actor’s clothing, but also have the freedom to change the way he or she moves.”
The algorithm was created from footage of people IRL. The researchers, lead by Carsten Stoll at the Max Plank Institute, mapped the actor’s movements (and how their clothes moved in reaction) onto a skeleton, which they could animate. Animations of new movements of the skeleton were able to recreate how clothing would move in real life, Stoll told New Scientist:
“If the double is wearing a chiffon skirt in the original sequence, it will swish realistically in all of the new sequences too,” says Stoll.
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Relax, Indiana Jones. Snakes aren’t so scary… as long as you’re wearing a good pair of jeans.
According to research done by scientists in California, denim provides more than classic American fashion statement. While this may seem somewhat obvious, the researchers are happy to announce that covering your legs with jeans doesn’t just reduce the amount of venom that a snakebite can inject into your system—it reduces it by a lot. From Reuters:
Drs. Shelton S. Herbert and William K. Hayes used latex gloves filled with saline to simulate a human appendage, then exposed the gloves to bites from small and large southern Pacific rattlesnakes. Some of the latex “limbs” were covered in a layer of denim.
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Swine flu season is raging, but there are ways to protect yourself: Get the swine flu vaccine, wash your hands, wear a mask over your nose and mouth…or buy a suit designed to protect against the flu.
After a year of designing and testing, Haruyama Trading Co. is now selling a line of 50,000 “swine-flu-proof suits” at $580 a piece. The suit is coated in titanium dioxide (a chemical used in toothpaste and cosmetics). The idea behind it is simple: When the virus lands on your clothing and is hit by light, the coating will kill any virus particles. (Titanium dioxide behaves like a photocatalyst, which needs light before it can destroy a virus.) The company claims the suit can still flight the flu even after it has gone through the wash.
We’re not sure how the suit is selling so far, but we do know that swine flu is spreading in Japan: 18 people have died so far and 23,275 cases of flu have been reported.
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Image: iStockPhoto
The best robots compete in RoboGames, just as the best athletes train for the Olympics. But anyone who plays sports in the winter knows that sometimes sweating underneath your clothes is unavoidable.
Now, Swiss researchers are using a specially-designed robot to test out new humidity-resistant gear that will maintain body heat for athletes training in freezing weather, by preventing sweat from soaking their clothes.
Called “Sam,” short for “Sweating Agile Mannequin,” the test robot can run, but more importantly, it can sweat. The robot, which took 5 years to construct, is built with 125 sweat nozzles from head to toe.
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