real genius

A clip from the 1985 comedy Real Genius in which a laser ignites a giant container of popcorn inside a house.

Epic's Unreal Engine 5 tech demo set in the Matrix universe, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. It moves from a cinematic to a playable car chase through a large detailed city, with a behind-the-scenes look at the rendering at the end.

Epic Games' reveal of Unreal Engine 5, a real-time demo running on PlayStation 5. It showcases Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry and Lumen global illumination.

The first lecture of Francis Su's Harvey Mudd real analysis course, covering the construction of the rational numbers. It begins a full lecture series that follows a standard analysis text.

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

A Numberphile interview with Donald Knuth about how he came to write the first book on surreal numbers after a lunch with John Conway. He tells the story casually in about 14 minutes.

Unity's real-time cinematic teaser 'Enemies' from its Demo Team, showcasing HDRP lighting, strand-based hair and an advanced digital human toolkit. It is a short showcase of high-end real-time rendering.

Tantacrul analyzes how stock music in reality TV uses blunt, repeated tropes to manipulate viewers, comparing it to nature documentaries. He ties it to ideas of reification and cultural homogenization.

Keiichi Matsuda's short concept film depicting a future where physical and virtual realities have merged and the city is saturated with media and advertising. It shows an augmented-reality-filled daily life as a provocative vision.

Rap Genius founders appear at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 for a joke-filled interview announcing News Genius, with little detail about what it is.

A short Magic Leap promo clip of a whale breaching through a gym floor in mixed reality.

Epic Games shows how LED walls can provide both virtual backgrounds and real lighting, letting scenes be captured in camera in a single pass with Unreal Engine.

A short preview of OTOY's Brigade 3.0 engine doing real-time path tracing, running on two GTX Titans.

A demo of Brigade 3 real-time path tracing at 720p controlled with an Xbox controller. Depth of field, field of view, reflections and shadows can be altered live.

Microsoft Research demonstrates holoportation, which reconstructs and compresses high-quality 3D models of people in real time and sends them anywhere. With a HoloLens, remote participants appear as if present in your room.

A two-minute NVIDIA RTX tech demo built on Remedy's Northlight engine, showing real-time ray-traced lighting and shadows in a game scene. It was shown alongside the launch of RTX and DirectX Raytracing.

An Onion News Network parody of a 'hyper-realistic' modern warfare game whose gameplay consists of paperwork, waiting for orders and repairing trucks.

Phoenix creator Chris McCord builds a real-time Twitter-style app live with Phoenix LiveView 1.5 in about 15 minutes. It shows interactive, real-time updates without writing JavaScript.

A 60fps capture of Future Crew's 1993 MS-DOS demo Second Reality, one of the best-known pieces of the demoscene. It runs about 16 minutes of real-time graphics and music effects on PC hardware of the era.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

Timur Doumler's CppCon 2015 talk on how C++ is used in the audio industry. It covers the patterns and tools audio developers rely on, including handling real-time constraints.

A capture of Second Reality, the real-time audiovisual demo by Future Crew first shown at Assembly 1993, recorded from a 486DX2-66 with a Gravis Ultrasound. It showcases the peak of early 1990s PC demoscene techniques.

Home video from 1993 showing Future Crew members at Mika Tuomi's home finishing the PC demo Second Reality shortly before release.

A video presenting an Intel research paper on enhancing the photorealism of synthetic images. A convolutional network uses rendering intermediates, shown on GTA V footage that comes out looking like real street scenes.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

A Two Minute Papers episode on NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder, which cleans up noisy Monte Carlo path-traced image sequences. It shows how a neural network can produce usable renders from very few samples.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

A GameTrailers walkthrough from E3 2012 of an Unreal Engine 4 real-time tech demo with Epic's Alan Willard. It shows live code changes and hot reloading while the game runs.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, reflects on the pressure placed on artists to be geniuses. She proposes the older idea that creative people have a genius that visits them rather than being one.

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

Gamers Nexus builds a fully ray-traced demo in Unreal Engine to compare faked global illumination with RTX ray-traced GI. It covers the gains in dynamic scenes and accuracy against the performance cost and noise.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs at the D3 conference in 2005 discussing virtual reality. He compares VR headsets to headphones for video, an analogy later applied to Apple's Vision Pro.

A one-month review of the Xreal (formerly Nreal) Air AR glasses by The Tech Chap, covering unboxing, setup, what the display looks like, and how mixed reality differs from AR. It ends with the reviewer's overall thoughts. The video is sponsored.

Louis Rossmann reacts to a CBC News segment in which an Apple Genius Bar quoted a costly logic board and display replacement for a MacBook that had only a bent pin. He explains why the repair is simple and what the case shows about Apple's repair practices.

Mozilla's short demo of Unreal Engine 3 running in Firefox, ported by Mozilla and Epic in four days using Emscripten and asm.js.

Guardian News coverage of Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 reveal of Facebook's metaverse plans alongside the rename to Meta. It shows a glimpse of the VR and AR vision.

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

A one-minute demo of Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates printed text in real time by overlaying the translation on the camera view. It was later folded into Google Translate.

Magic Leap's original 2015 concept video, made with Weta Workshop, showing what mixed reality could look like. It was posted to explain the company's goals to outsiders.

Henry Segerman and collaborators demonstrate virtual reality experiences in non-Euclidean spaces, including hyperbolic and mixed hyperbolic-Euclidean geometry. The browser-based demos let viewers move through these spaces and show how strange the geometry feels from inside.