Pretty Cool Things

Everyone who’s worked in an office environment has experienced the contemptible act of a co-worker ‘stealing’ their lunch from the communal fridge at least once. Well, here comes the Anti-Theft lunch Bag to the rescue. Anti-Theft Lunch Bags come with green splotches on both sides of the bag. Pack your sandwich in this, and no one will want to touch it… unless it falls into the hands of the office neat freak;  you know, the guy who throws out all of the stale-looking forgotten lunches and expired yogurts.

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Emily is the creation of Image Metrics in partnership with USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Using ICT’s special scanning system that can capture facial details down to the individual pore, the face of actress Emily O’Brien was transformed into a digital representation of herself, which could then be entirely machine-manipulated. A special spherical lighting rig captured O’Brien in 35 reference facial poses using a pair of high resolution digital cameras. The facial maps were then converted into 3D data using Image Metrics’ proprietary markerless motion capture technology.  Image Metrics then generated a new animation sequence and precisely superimposed it onto the live actress’ head. As you can see from the video below, you’d be really hard-pressed to tell the difference between digital Emily and real-world Emily.

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The following lightning strike captured by storm chaser Tim Samaras is one of the first ever video captures slow enough (100,000 frames/second) to show lightning as it actually travels toward the ground and back toward the sky. Using an Ultra-High Speed camera that he heavily customized, Samaras was able to confirm that the lightning we see with the naked eye is actually the return stroke back toward the sky, not the superfast downward stroke. This video provides visible proof of this theory.