second reality

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

A SIGGRAPH demo from Yoichi Ochiai's group of aerial and volumetric graphics drawn by focused femtosecond lasers with computational holography. The plasma points can be touched.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

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

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

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 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.

Ben Katz's custom robot solves a Rubik's Cube in 0.38 seconds. The description links to the hardware and software write-ups.

MIT Media Lab shows an imaging system capturing a trillion frames per second, fast enough to film light pulses travelling through objects in slow motion.

LockPickingLawyer picks an Amazon's Choice 'high security' padlock in about two seconds.

The ED-209 boardroom scene from the 1987 film RoboCop, where the enforcement droid malfunctions after giving a man 20 seconds to comply.

A one-minute clip of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner delivering the line that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

A short clip of the Sprint anti-ballistic missile, which was launched from a silo and reached Mach 10 within seconds. Its nose and skin glow white hot from aerodynamic heating.

UploadVR covers a Facebook Reality Labs prototype that tracks facial expressions using cameras mounted in a VR headset. The updated version captures subtle micro-expressions for realistic avatars.

Google's early concept video for Project Glass, showing a wearer navigating a city with augmented-reality glasses that surface contextual information. It was made when the project was just starting.

Brandon Thomas demos Laser Pong, a game he built on a laser projector and projected onto buildings around Atlanta. It was a weekend project.

A SpaceX concept animation showing the planned fully reusable Falcon 9, with both first and second stages performing vertical landings.

A short 2012 promotional-style video of Google Glass showing what the headset was meant to do. It shows features like map directions and overlays in the wearer's view.

A four-minute extract from the documentary The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara discusses the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He acknowledges that the second reported attack did not happen.

Google ATAP's short 2014 introduction to Project Tango, a mobile device effort to give phones and tablets a human-scale understanding of space and motion. It pitches ideas like indoor navigation and games that interact with your physical space.

A short clip of the McMurtry Speirling fan car setting a new Goodwood Hill record of 39.08 seconds at the 2022 Festival of Speed, driven by Max Chilton. It beat the previous timed shootout record set in 1999 and the outright record held by the VW ID.R.

Coverage of the McMurtry Speirling fan car breaking the Goodwood hillclimb record with a 39.08 second run driven by Max Chilton. It beat the Volkswagen ID.R and the 1999 McLaren time.

Short footage of the 1983 Soyuz T-10-1 pad fire, in which the launch escape tower pulled the crew away seconds before the rocket exploded.

A short Ze Frank piece from his 2006 show about "brain crack", the rush of exciting new ideas that feel great but tend to fall apart once you start executing them.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

Victor Hugo Morales's famous radio commentary of Maradona's second goal against England at the 1986 World Cup. The emotional call is for many Argentines inseparable from the goal itself.

A 54-second clip from the film Office Space in which two coworkers talk about what they would do with a million dollars. The answers contrast blue-collar and white-collar attitudes toward work.

Tom Scott's three-minute satirical short about a corporate-run, DRM-and-ads-laden afterlife after mind uploading. It imagines copyright law and lawyers applied to human memory and consciousness.

Short US Missile Defense Agency footage of the December 2008 free-flight hover test of Lockheed Martin's Multiple Kill Vehicle. The test showed it hovering for 20 seconds while tracking a simulated target.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

The official music video for Macklemore & Ryan Lewis's Thrift Shop featuring Wanz, a hip hop hit celebrating secondhand shopping.

A one-minute clip from a cat cafe in Japan where sleeping cats wake and look around just before an earthquake begins shaking the room.

A short South China Morning Post report on Nio's second-generation automated battery-swap stations for electric vehicles. It notes that Nio had built more than 800 stations in China by early 2022.

A That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a customer tries to buy a gift for his aunt in a shop that keeps pushing him toward extras.

A clip of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull saying the laws of Australia prevail over the laws of mathematics, regarding encryption. The audio is quiet in the second half.

A short Microsoft promo comparing classic Teams with the rewritten new Teams side by side, claiming faster startup and better performance. The new version is shown taking around nine seconds to launch.

The opening credit sequence of the 1960s British spy series The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan. It is a short intro to a cult TV show.

A 20-second clip from the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles featuring the line about morons.