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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Samy Kamkar demonstrates OpenSesame, a device that opens many fixed-code garage doors in seconds by exploiting a newly found attack, built around a Mattel toy. The video explains the attack and which brands are affected.

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

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

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 five-minute video showing how to build a counter in the Imba web programming language in under a minute, then style it.

Tested gets hands-on with four Meta Reality Labs research VR headset prototypes testing resolution, brightness, focus shifting and form factor, plus an interview with Mark Zuckerberg on display technology.

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 Technology Connections update video in which Alec Watson tests an Onyx Boox Max e-ink Android tablet used as an external display and shares channel news. It describes his experience with large-format e-ink.

Raw 500 fps footage from Camera E-8 on the launch tower for the Apollo 11 Saturn V liftoff, transferred in HD from the 16mm original. More than eight minutes of film covers about 30 seconds of real time.

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

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 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.

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.

Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

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.

Chaos Theory is a 64k demoscene intro by Conspiracy and CNS that took second place at Assembly 2006, generating its graphics and music from a tiny executable.

A short clip showing a person touching an active table saw blade with a finger and walking away unharmed, thanks to SawStop's system that stops the blade within milliseconds of skin contact.

debuglive makes a 1990-style dance track on an Amiga 500 with a Stereo Master sampler and cheap secondhand records, showing how sampling and trackers worked within tight memory limits.

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.

Red Bull and the Dutch Drone Gods follow Max Verstappen's RB20 F1 car around Silverstone in a single FPV shot using a custom drone that accelerates to 300 km/h in about four seconds. The video also covers the year of development behind the drone.

Quint BUILDs tests a rooftop water storage setup in which solar power pumps water up to the roof and a turbine generates power later. He works through the numbers to show how much energy it actually stores.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day fires .22 Magnum and .38 Special bullets at Prince Rupert's drops, filmed at 170,000 frames per second. The slow-motion footage shows the bullet shattering against the glass tadpole while the drop initially survives.

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.

Ten minutes of ultra-slow-motion footage of bullet impacts filmed at about one million frames per second by Werner Mehl of Kurzzeit. It includes hollow points in ballistics gel and impacts on glass.

A six-minute journey through the layers of a neural network using Deep Dream, with each frame fed back into the network starting from random noise and the targeted layer changing every four seconds. It is set to downtempo music.

Carwow's review of the McMurtry Spéirling, a 1,000hp electric fan car that generates huge downforce at standstill and reaches 0-60mph in about 1.4 seconds.