Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Unobtainium in 3D

I recently watched "Ferngully II; Dances with USB enabled 10 foot tall Smurfs" (Avatar). The movie was good, the story was very thin but I only had one "cringe worthy" moment: they are mining for something called "unobtainium ". Really guys, is that all you could come up with?

But that is not that is not what I want to talk about, my big thought coming from the movie is that "3D" technology is heading in the wrong direction. Sure Avatar is darn good use of the current technology but I don't think we aren’t going to be able to get very much further on the road that we are traveling.

To me the current "3D" movies seem instead as 2D with depth. The problem is that the movies are still be recorded with one focus point, that means that while the movie is going on there is only one thing that is in focus, and if I am not looking at that then everything is going to be blurry. Take this to contrast real life 3D, whatever I am looking at is in focus while everything else is blurry. The result of this type of 3D is that we get a superficially looking 3D movie but the viewers are still restrained to look at a specific spot and depth in the movie.

I think that this is a good first step, however, since we are about to get ESPN broadcast in this 3D technology it may take a while to move on to something that is better.

Oh well, for now we will just have to put up with those stylish glasses in the theatres... and soon at home.

Monday, January 04, 2010

I got it!

Let's just get past the obvious things, so I can get on with the other stuff.  Nicole and I are expecting our first baby in May, Christmas and New Year's was great and Caesar Salad dressing made with Egg Beaters takes the same as with raw eggs (so just use that instead).  Nicole does a much better job of keeping up with the events of our lives so check out her blog to see details.

For Christmas I got a set of metal puzzles. After I figured out the pattern of how they work I made pretty quick work of all but one of them. I sat and worked on it for a good 10 minutes before I decided to work on it some more, but from in front of the TV. I worked on it a good time more (maybe 30 or so more minutes... but to give me credit I was watching TV at the same time.) Anyways, I couldn't get it.

Nicole's mom asked to try, so I gave the puzzle to Nikki, my 3 year old niece to pass on over. I the time it took her to make it to Niocle's mom, she says "I got it!" and the two metal pieces are separated.

Grumble.

Let's see her try to figure out how to check for type I error rates in the way that we have implemented neural networks. She wouldn't get that one in 10 seconds.