The video below starts with some explanation of what is about to happen, which is worth listening to so you understand the reason your jaw hits the desk at around the 2:45 mark.

Head tracking desktop VR is the new black.

As you are now well aware, the guys name is Johnny Chung Lee. He’s a graduate PhD at Carnegie Mellon. In addition to writing sweet code, he also makes and sells a $14 Steadycam.

The world needs many more of this guy.

I must have seen every photograph of the Trinity era experiments and their offspring in the following decades. Except for a few famous photos and films, like this sobering clip of the 50 mt Soviet Tsar Bomba test: it was nearly all American footage.

What’s different about that photograph above? It’s late 60’s French vintage. Amazing. The images are scans from hardcopies taken by the French Army during a series of tests codenamed Canopus in French Polynesia. Four images in the set.

This one made my jaw hit the desk:

Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee said:

“I expect him to be confirmed, I want him to succeed.”

Vocal administration critic Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. offered:

“I don’t know of a single Democrat (on the panel) inclined not to support him.”

I hope the Democrats are pretty fucking sure this guy is on their side of the argument. That he will happily slather grease on the wheels of the investigations needed to shed light on just exactly what the fuck has been going on in the Justice Department for nearly six years.

With that in mind, the new season of Frontline premiered tonight on PBS with a documentary titled Cheney’s Law. I missed it on TV, and you probably did too, but thanks to the ponderous tubes of these internets - I just watched it. It’s an hour long, served up in 7 barely digestable slices. It’s a stunning refresher course on the speed with which the rule of law is being disappeared, with missionary zeal, by the most senior members of the executive branch. Truly stunning.

If you’re not a regular viewer of Frontline, here are few standout episodes from earlier seasons. Compelevision!

Merchants of Cool
Be amazed by the sleaze fest of the marketing arts, of which I am a very minor practitioner… Apologies.

The Persuaders
Successfully builds on the foundation laid out in Merchants of Cool which was made in 2001 - but at the most elite level of the business, and from 2004. Riveting.

Secret History of the Credit Card
Bear witness to the immoral audacity of the industry to which you are likely an indentured servant. Award Winning.

Gangs of Iraq
The war gets more brutal for those fighting and living in Iraq daily. This is an intimate glimpse at what the war looked like on the ground at the beginning of this year. Really provides context for hawk arguments that grow more esoteric daily.

And finally, The Mormons
If you’re going to watch just one, this would be a good choice. It’s the Frontline team - firing on all cylinders - for 240 minutes. A richly detailed history of The Latter Day Saints.
Brush up on Mitt Romney’s faith… Just in case.

Now if we could just figure out a way to get those future vintage Rock and Republic jeans delivered via the Home Post Office featured below…

Viral marketing holds promise online - especially as it relates to video. BMW created a series of films with high profile names to pimp their brand, delivering it through their own website. It made a lot of noise at the time, although I’m not sure how it affected sales, it surely helped shape the brand.

So how about skivvies? You can advertise them the old school way… like really oldschool… pitch them as the perfect Mothers Day gift (even the dog is in on this one), or the new “internet way” as Google does (if you click the skivvies link, you’re guaranteed to be served underwear related ads on the sidebar of Urban Dictionary site).

But what about branding, and online viral video marketing?

UK boutique lingerie house Lascivious has teamed up with motion shop Wyld Stallyons to create a campaign meant to both sell some delicate unmentionables and raise the profile of the design studio. The result is a short film called The Doll which has just been released. (NSFW if you work somewhere where people care about that type of thing)

As of right now it’s got about 1300 views on YouTube. It will be interesting to see if this combination of slick editing, nice effects work, scantily clad ladies and the promise of violent lesbian robot sex will “go viral” as they say. Are you kidding me? With all of those geek sex credentials and a nice behind the scenes flik as well, it’s hard to imagine how it won’t have hundreds of thousands of page views in the next week or so… but will it sell the underpants? For $100 a pair (and way up), are you in?

The comments of that post are where the real action is… plenty of back and forth about the promise and/or folly of multi-touch as a viable day-to-day interface for working with the Macintosh. When it comes to how I work on the computer - mostly designing in Adobe Applications, I can’t imagine multi-touch having enough resolution to work well. A mouse seems way more precise when it comes to selecting control points, or even adjusting parameters in filter menus than my finger. I’m not even comfortable using a laptop’s touch pad.

Certainly there are applications where this wouldn’t be the case - specifically, the post talks about Apple’s Pro applications like Logic, and presumably Final Cut at some point. I can definitely see the advantage of working on a multi-touch interface that emulates a mixing board - but that’s pretty niche for a major announcement. It reminded me of a patent application Apple filed a while back for interfaces that combine “mechanical overlay” devices with touch screens. In the patent drawings they sketch out what looks like a mixing board with a row of sliders on top of a touch screen. The apparent advantage would be having the familiar feel of feedback that you get from analog controls like sliders and knobs. In the sketch below, #14 represents the touch screen that the mechanics would overlay. Seems very cool, but also very niche.

Mac NN did a major post on the patent back in November which is worth reading if you missed it. There are plenty more drawings that explore the possibilities of the overlay as interface.

Obviously years from now and with significant redesign at the most base level of how we interact with computers multi-touch could be amazing, but I’m more interested in now.

My friend Tunc is probably the most technology hungry Mac fanatic early adopter I know, so what do you think Tunc? Are you on board with the mutli-touch revolution or is it just a niche gimmick better left to big table tops in hotel lobbies?

Late Update: Tunc is completely on board.

Likely from the same minds that decided to call the Zune file sharing feature “squirting”.
Perhaps a Google search is in order next time?

I’ll stick with Jeff Han’s preview of the multi touch interface from TED a couple of years ago.
Twice the wow with none of the cringe.

Richard Sweeney out of the UK is pushing and pulling paper in an entirely different direction. Admittedly, his work owes as much to structural design and architecture as it does origami (likely more), but his creations elicit a similar feeling - awe, at the elegance and seeming impossibility of the creations.

Truly amazing work…

Website, Flickr Set and full Flickr Stream.

I’ve never been a fan of the big Hollywood animated feature. I’ve never seen Toy Story or the sinister Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo or the majority of the genres œuvre, but for a long time I was still “wowed” by CGI in a technical sense. That one concession ended a while back though. We’ve reached a technical plateau in the sense that the visuals being presented aren’t compromised by the softwares inability to deliver, aside from those projects which try to achieve human realism.

So I’m at the point now where I resent much of the CGI I come across in movies or on TV. It’s formulaic and gimmicky, redundant and conspicuous. Oh look, penguins dancing again… Oh joy, the talking dog offers me delicious death by E. coli, and the talking baby wants me to eat a sandwich… Color me “wowed.”

For these reasons and countless others, I champion projects like those below. Please, isn’t there a single director in the Hollywood system with the tenacity and resources to make a sci-fi movie the old school way? Where is the next generation Ridley Scott? Somebody bust out the glue and make some goddamn miniatures. I’d put 2001 or Alien up against any CGI malpractice from the last decade.

All hail analog!

My design firm, eyerus propaganda is responsible for visual identity of the project.