A few weeks back James Cameron spoke at the TED conference about the very successful movie Avatar and a few influences to the movie. At the time I had not seen Avatar, but this week right before it left theaters I finally watched it (twice) and understand his lecture a great deal more.. It’s pretty amazing how much influence Abyss the movie had to Avatar and how Titanic was the fund raiser for it.
Watch the video above or on TEDtalks.
“James Cameron’s big-budget (and even bigger-grossing) films create unreal worlds all their own. In this personal talk, he reveals his childhood fascination with the fantastic — from reading science fiction to deep-sea diving — and how it ultimately drove the success of his blockbuster hits “Aliens,” “The Terminator,” “Titanic” and “Avatar.”"
Hmmm, perhaps one day we wont be looking at pixels on a screen, but walking right into them thanks to these firefly LED flying bots. I’d like to imagine them as LED dust instead. Watch the video here.
“In this wide-ranging, thought-provoking talk from TEDxAmsterdam, Kevin Kelly muses on what technology means in our lives — from its impact at the personal level to its place in the cosmos.”
Incredible talk by Bill Gates about his vision to solve the worlds energy crisis at TED2010:
“At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world’s energy future, describing the need for “miracles” to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he’s backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.”
Wow! Bing has really taken Maps navigation to a new level. First off they are finally integrating Photosynth into Maps which will take some time to become more common due to cameras lacking gps data, but then they blow the socks off of the TED audience with streaming video footage inside a map taking augmented reality to a live reality. Watch the video above to be blown away!
Happy Holiday to everyone. I’ll be out in Hong Kong for the break and will be back with some goodies to post most likely dealing with food, shopping, and culture.
If you have not already, please join the Facebook Fan page here which I post to often but write less and it’s open for fans to post to as well. I’ll post a few goodies I shared on the fan page below recently for the holiday break:
Running Jumping rabbit video! Pretty neat. Now they need to strap a camera on the car to sense oncoming objects to let the animation react to real time objects it’s projected on!
I’m off to Poptech 2009: America Reimagined for the rest of the week. Follow their PopTech hub for live updates and I’m hoping like in previous years the live broadcast of all the speakers. It’ll be a chilly one this year, but I’ll be back with some updates, posts, and goodies like before.
update: Ah, yes, they are streaming it as usual here.
