Weekend in Vienna

Me and my girlfriend, Kristine, went to Vienna this weekend. Our Christmas present to each other this year.

After arriving Friday night and checking in at the Steinberger hotel in the center of the city we took a walk to get the lay of the land (which is completely flat by the way).





Just up the road we found this amazing building - which amongst other things houses the Spanish Riding School where you'll find the famous Lipizzaner stallions.





Ice skating seems to be pretty big in Vienna and they have several, big, courses around town. This one on a beautiful location with music and lights as well.





First thing Saturday morning we visited Schmetterling Haus which is THE place to go if you like butterflies in Vienna - which my GF does :)




First thing we noticed when we got inside was that the "climate" was indeed tropical - and next all the butterflies flittering around us. It is forbidden to touch them, but we couldn't stop them from occasionally landing on us though ;)

Since it was extremely humid my camera fogged up, since I had been using it outside in the cold. Therefore I had to wait a while before I could get any decent pictures. By then all of the beautiful, blue butterflies, and most of the others, had retired to the glass ceiling to soak up the sun. Big tip if you are going there; try to be there when they open at 10 in the morning.

We also visited Schönbrunn palace just outside of Vienna. Outside it's really not that much to brag about - other than being huuuge, but inside it's quite impressive! Unfortunately you are not allowed to take pictures inside so we'll have to settle for a picker of a pidgeon house from the garden instead. I like the design!




We didn't have time to walk around the estate this time. The guided tour, with bus, takes a couple of hours so doing it on foot would take a while... Something to do during the summer - when it's lush and green :) There were a lot of joggers out there though.

In the evening we went to a Mozart & Strauss concert. It was not just a traditional concert, but had a couple of opera singers and ballet dancers as well. Kind of a Kinder Egg thing that way. Neither of us are particularly into either of these, but being in Vienna you kind of have to experience something like this! All in all a great experience! The artists were top class, as well as we could tell at least ;)

On Sunday we had planned, amongst other things, to go see the Lipizzaner show and go ice skating, but unfortunately both me and Kristine fell ill so we spent the most of the day in bed. We felt a bit better in the evening so at least we managed to get outside for a small walk and dinner (classic Wiener Schnitzel of course) at a local restaurant.

Travelled back to Oslo again on Monday. All in all it's been a great weekend - in spite of a laid-back Sunday. Vienna is a wonderful city, with great architecture, that we both liked very much. Wouldn't mind going back some day! :)

Location:Vienna

Virtual Reality Redux

It seems Virtual Reality is gaining popularity again. I remember back in the 90' when VR was the big hype, but never took off because og the lacking hardware - both to produce the images fast enough as well as capturing user input accurately enough. There was also the problem with lag since the hardware available needed time to crunch the numbers.

Nowadays there's no question of the hardware being powerful enough and as we've seen the last couple of years the sensor technology and finding innovative ways of deploying it certainly has improved.

A while ago I came over the VR game gun which shows how "easy" it is to use off the shelf components and software and make something quite cool - as long as you have an idea.



This system, although functioning, would require a very larg venue to be practical so keeping yourselfe stationary, but still moving around in the virtual environment has been one of the other big issues needing solving. Creating a big sphere, ie a gigantic hamster ball, where you can round around inside is not a new idea, but I haven't seen anyone actually creating such a device until now.



My biggest concern about this sollution is momentum. No matter what material you decide to use to construct the sphere it will have considerable mass and coming to a complete halt after running will test your balance. I would love to try it out though :)

More information at the VirtuSphere homepage.

Arduino heaven

Wohoo! I received my package from Sparkfun today. It was packed with no less than three Arduinos (mega, pro 328 and pro mini 328) as well as an Arduino shield, 6-degree gyro parts and a MaxSonar ultrasonic range finder.

I've coded and scripted in quite a few languages up through the years, but I have never done anything with micro-controllers so I'm definitely jumping into the deep end with this. Should be fun :)

Magic clouds

Looking out the window from my living room It was hard not noticing these clouds colored by the setting sun. They might as well be taken straight out of an old Disney movie :)

Open source car

Riversimple has a new car project in the works. Although "open source" cars has been tried before this one is particular interesting since it's based on fuel cell technology. Also; they're planning to produce the car and you can lease it from them as well. If you choose to lease it over 20 (!) years they'll even throw in the fuel for free.

As an urban car I think it might be successful, but for longer trips it might have the range, but not the baggage capacity.

Article about the project can be found at Autocar.co.uk.

Zero emission cars

Shai Agassi has come up with the most brilliant way of speeding up the change to zero-emission cars i.e. electric cars. I believe the biggest hurdle is price. People will say that they care about the environment and the future of the planet, but in reality it's only up to a point. They will always go for the cheaper alternative - as long as the price difference is more than negligible. In his talk Shai shows how you can split the car from the battery and make the electric car more economic to buy and use than one running on gasoline.



However, there's still the issue of battery production and CO2 (and other environmental toxins) linked to that, but I believe you have to start somewhere and he has some really good solutions to how to best get more environmentally friendly cars accepted in the first place. Once the ball get's running we will for sure find better ways to store the electric energy than the current variety of batteries.

[UPDATE]
I came over an article in Wired today about the startup company Better Place - founded by Shai Agassi. They were showing off their fully automated battery-swap station. Now, if we only can get all the auto-makers to standardise one battery system...

Mocap

Working in the VFX industry I'm always on the lookout for new technology or techniques. Yesterday I came over this new system for doing motion capture that shows a lot of promise.

Basically, instead of using infrared cameras and ping pong markers or magnetic sensing, this system consists of several ir projectors and active sensors on the wearer. Apparently it doesn't have any limitations on the number of tracking points and it has absolute addressing on each tracking point so the usual issues with optical tracking is not so much of an issue. A basic setup will cost around $1000, in basic hardware costs, which is really cheap for this kind of equipment.

Now we only have to wait for it to be commercialized. Hurry up please :)