Category Archives: ideas

PyPlants — Now with added dimensions

PyPlants has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few days (well, even­ings), and now from its new home as PyPlants on bit­bucket sports a com­pletely rewrit­ten ren­der­ing backend which is more mod­u­lar, should be really easy to plug into, and now sup­ports POV-Ray out of the box.
What’s that you say? A 3-D ray-tracer?

Tactile Computing

Every now and then someone at TED presents a tech­no­logy or an idea that’s so utterly amaz­ing, or ridicu­lously simple that it can’t help but change the world. David Merrill shows off an MIT pro­ject called Siftables in this talk, and even though I’ve been mess­ing around with com­put­ing for 25 years my jaw is

Thinking About Genius

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the 2006 best seller Eat, Pray, Love, and in this year’s TED talks gave a fant­astic talk on the nature of cre­at­ive genius. In a room full of sci­ent­ists, this talk on being pos­sessed by a cre­at­ive muse, a spirit of genius, raised a stand­ing ova­tion. This utterly enthralling talk is an

Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

This video present­a­tion from Siggraph 2007 has been pop­ping up all over the inter­nets the last couple of days, and the implic­a­tions are truly aston­ish­ing. Algorithmically this is a remark­ably simple tech­nique, and eas­ily imple­men­ted in real-time. It should be pretty straight-forward to write an imple­ment­a­tion in ActionScript 3 (for Flash 9) or in IronPython

Game Ideas: Duality

Basic premise:
Players in a per­sist­ent vir­tual world inhabit two states — two par­al­lel lives.
When not act­ive in the world, play­ers take on the role of NPCs, their bod­ies under the con­trol of basic AI routines that go about daily life in any of the towns and vil­lages that scat­ter the world. The ful­fil the roles of