Augmented, but real, and wordy, and sublime

A short collage of things from here and further abroad that have permeated the blogosphere in recent times.

Tardigotchi by Tiago Rorke and SWAMP, with assistance from Bureau.
An international collaborating design team largely involved at Victoria University of Wellington's School of Design have produced an uncanny device (and its world), the Tardigotchi, portrayed in a short video you can view here.

They elaborate "Tardigotchi is an artwork featuring two pets: a living organism and an alife avatar. These two disparate beings find themselves the unlikely denizens of a portable computing enclosure. The main body for this enclosure is a brass sphere, housing the alife avatar in an LED screen and the tardigrade within a prepared slide. A tardigrade is a common microorganism measuring half a millimeter in length. The alife avatar is a caricature of this tardigrade, its behaviour is partially autonomous, but it also reflects a considerable amount of expression directly from the tardigrade’s activities (like eating)."

The Tardigotchi, being fed.

The Tardigotchi, at its docking station.

A detail of the Tardigotchi schematics.

Stockholm Library Interior by Olivier Charles.
Featured at the CG Society of Digital Arts, Charles's render is a competition image developed in 3ds Max, alongside a sketch design from collaborating architects Armel Neouze and Jacques Gelez. The link above will take you to a short article which goes through his process in creating the engrossing image.

A section of the Library design, revealing the vertical cut, at right.

The 3ds Max model in development.

The completed render.

"This concept was made for an International Competition of Architecture, for the Stockholm Public Library. The project was conceived by Armel Neouze, Jacques Gelez and myself, and we entered the image into the competition after creating more than 1,000 renders. We started our project with some quick drawings and some deep discussion." -Olivier Charles.

Olivier Charles graduated from the Architecture School of Paris La Seine. He started to work with 3ds Max 11 years ago.

Words presented by Radiolab and NPR, from here.
A short film by Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante with an original soundtrack composed by Keith Kenniff. Sorry if the credits are confused and multiple, the names are right, but there seem to be a lot of organisations and websites involved in production, broadcasting, promotion, etc.

Nontheless, this short film is a beautiful piece of work, dancing through our language in words and associations. It makes unexpected and sometimes flittering references and connections, in a few short minutes which keep up a keen energy. Give it a few minutes to keep your mind sharp, and if you've got a few more spare, check out Everynone's other short films, all of which are beautifully produced. See them here.

Some stills from WORDS.

And finally, this is cool, (yet another) augmented reality video portrayal from Keiichi Matsuda, although this one has the clever option of viewing in 3D (if you've got your goggles handy), but awesomely, you can just click the 'cross-eyed' veiwing option and use your Magic-Eye trick to see it in 'manual-virtual' 3D. It's interesting to consider that viewing this in 'cross-eyed' 3D is easy enough, but after 3 minutes it is worryingly difficult for your eyes to stay in Real-D.. a warning I reckon of the very real risk of having an obtrusive (or dependent) visually augmented reality.