second reality

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Flanders and Swann perform 'First and Second Law', a comic song about the laws of thermodynamics, from their 1964 stage show At the Drop of Another Hat. It sets the first and second laws to a deadpan call-and-response routine.

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.

Grace Hopper appears on Letterman and uses a foot-long piece of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rick Roderick's 1993 lecture on Baudrillard, the last in his series The Self Under Siege. It covers hyperreality, simulation and what Baudrillard calls fatal strategies.

Lex Fridman has a three-hour conversation with Joscha Bach about artificial consciousness, the workings of the mind, intelligence and the possibly simulated nature of reality.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

A short video on the US Sprint anti-ballistic missile, which accelerated to around Mach 10 in seconds under extreme g-forces and heat. It includes striking launch footage and a brief development history.

A documentary on Clive Wearing, a renowned musician whose brain was damaged by a virus in 1985, leaving him with a memory spanning only about seven seconds. It follows his life and condition.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

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.

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a technique that captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough to show light itself moving through a scene. He discusses possible uses such as cameras that see around corners or inside the body.

LockPickingLawyer cuts through a LiteLok flexible bike lock with cable cutters in about 16 seconds, one of several videos defeating the product.

Scott Manley tells the story of a computerized telemetry system built to sit at the heart of a nuclear test device in place of the plutonium pit, designed to transmit data in the microseconds before it was destroyed.

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 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.

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

AlphaPhoenix uses a custom high-speed measurement setup to watch voltage waves travel down wires and split at a fork. It answers how electricity knows where to go and how quickly that process happens.

Optiver's Carl Cook explains how to build high-frequency trading systems in C++, where the critical path runs rarely but must be extremely fast. He covers techniques for low and predictable latency, including avoiding main memory and cache misses.

PBS Space Time explains Noether's theorem: conservation laws such as energy and momentum are consequences of deeper symmetries. It also covers why those laws hold only under certain conditions.

David MacKay's TEDxWarwick talk uses basic arithmetic to show how much land and energy renewables would need to power a country like the UK. It explains the limits of sustainable options and why they should still be pursued.

A long Lex Fridman interview with Stephen Wolfram on complexity, cellular automata, computational irreducibility and the Wolfram Physics Project.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.

A lecture from the 1980s by linguist Stephen Krashen on how people acquire language. He explains his comprehensible input hypothesis for second-language acquisition.

A 60 Minutes Australia segment on people with highly superior autobiographical memory, who can recall the details of any day of their lives. It presents the rare phenomenon through interviews with people who have it.

Tech Ingredients builds a pair of large Voigt speakers and explains ported, transmission line and horn designs. It tests them in an anechoic chamber and uses constrained layer damping for the enclosure.

Mel Robbins gives a TEDxSF talk on why people sabotage themselves and how to push past hesitation. It is the source of her 'count backward from five' technique.