sudden motion sensor

A very short demo of SmackBook, a hack that used the MacBook Pro's sudden motion sensor so that smacking the sides of the laptop switches desktop spaces.

David Sachs of InvenSense explains how gyroscopes, accelerometers and compasses work on their own and together, demonstrated on a modified Android handset. He covers sensor fusion algorithms and why rotation math such as Euler angles matters.

Technology Connections explains how automatic windshield wiper rain sensors work, using an infrared light source and total internal reflection in the glass.

Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett presents her research on what emotions are, arguing that the brain constructs them rather than reading them off faces. She says this means we have more control over our emotions than we think.

A short Harris Corporation (L3Harris) promotional video showing wide-area airborne motion imagery, a sensor system for persistent real-time aerial surveillance of large areas.

Ian Hubert shows how to use Blender's motion tracking to turn ordinary footage of a room into a stylized digital environment for an indie film. It is a quick, practical walkthrough in his loose, lazy-tutorial style.

Steve Mould explains motion amplification and video magnification, techniques that find tiny changes in video invisible to the eye and exaggerate them. He covers the MIT research and industrial uses such as diagnosing vibrating machinery.

A 2013 research demo of simulated bipedal creatures whose natural gaits are found by optimizing muscle-based controllers, with no motion capture or keyframe animation. It shows physics-based walking and running emerging from musculoskeletal models.

Destin of Smarter Every Day films a cat falling in high-speed slow motion to show how cats right themselves in midair, and introduces the physics behind it.

An excerpt from Russell Barkley's lecture on ADHD, focusing on inhibition, impulsivity and emotional regulation. It explains ADHD as a problem of response inhibition and emotional impulsivity.

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 short National Geographic piece showing a laser system that tracks and kills mosquitoes, filmed in slow motion, as part of anti-malaria efforts. It comes from Intellectual Ventures' 2010 work.

Smarter Every Day uses high-speed and Schlieren photography to show how a whip crack is a supersonic shockwave formed at the tip. It references academic papers on whip physics.

The Slow Mo Guys film a TV and screens with a high-speed camera to show how displays build an image. The footage includes CRT-style scanning and how pixels light up over time.

A two-minute Insider Tech clip on DeepMind's simulated agents that learned to walk, run, jump and climb without guidance, with the goofy resulting gaits.

Technology Connections examines an old feature-rich microwave and shows how it uses a humidity or steam sensor and lookup data to cook food well, arguing it beats many modern ones.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on the limbic system as the emotional part of the nervous system, covering its role in decision making, links to the cortex and the functions of its subparts.

Researchers from the Artificial Life Lab Graz introduce the Primordial Particle System, where a simple motion law for self-propelled particles produces cell-like structures that self-reproduce and show life cycles.

FortNine looks at why Tesla Autopilot has rear-ended motorcyclists, speculating that the vision system misreads motorcycle taillights as a distant car. It argues that radar and other sensors would help.

An animation presenting a non-standard helical or vortex model of the solar system, in which the planets trail the Sun through space instead of orbiting in flat circles. The model is a non-conventional view that the author says differs from standard diagrams.

A CNN segment showing William Shatner emotionally describing his Blue Origin suborbital flight to Jeff Bezos right after landing.

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.

An old lab video of a decerebrate cat walking on a treadmill and shifting between gait patterns as the speed changes. It is used to illustrate that much locomotion control comes from the spinal cord and body mechanics rather than the brain.

Dr. Russell Barkley gives a nearly three-hour lecture of essential ideas about ADHD for parents, covering what ADHD is, its effects on executive function, motivation and emotion, and how it affects children.

Chris Toomey of thoughtbot explains Vim as a language of commands, motions and text objects that combine into precise edits. He shows how to master the built-in pieces and extend them.

Chris Urmson's SXSW 2016 talk on Google's self-driving car project, covering 1.3 million self-driven miles and the gap between hype and reality. It shows sensor visualizations and playbacks of hard situations the cars met, and discusses failures such as the low-speed bus collision.

Smarter Every Day films Prince Rupert's drops, tempered glass drops, in high-speed slow motion at 130,000 fps. It shows how the drop's heavy internal stress lets the head survive hits while the tail shatters the whole thing.

Captain Disillusion's VFXcool episode, led by Alan Melikdjanian, takes a 41-minute nostalgic look at how the visual effects of Flight of the Navigator were made. It covers early computers, motion control, in-camera effects and practical crafts.

Animator Noodle explains why frame interpolation does not make animation better, covering timing, easing, smear frames and using the wrong tool for the job. A pinned correction says the video is partly outdated given later AI developments.

A 1983 behind-the-scenes film about making the HBO 'Feature Presentation' starship logo sequence. It shows the handcrafted miniature city, motion-control cameras and practical effects.

Mark Rober shows an automatic bullseye dartboard that tracks a thrown dart with motion capture and moves in real time so it always hits the center. He spent over three years on the project.

A short Techquickie explainer on why laptop webcams are much worse than phone cameras. It covers sensor size, image processing, and the interface differences between laptops and phones, with input from a Logitech engineer.

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.

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.

Tanya Reilly's LeadDev talk on glue work, the invisible coordination and support tasks engineers do that keep teams successful but can hurt careers.

A hobbyist builds a prototype full-frame CCD camera from scratch, with open-source design files and a custom PCB. The video shows the first, still rough prototype.

OK Go's music video for The One Moment, in collaboration with Morton Salt. It is a choreographed real-time scene that took about 4.2 seconds to film and is shown slowed down to the length of the song.

MORE is Mark Osborne's Oscar-nominated stop-motion short about a joyless inventor in a drab, conformist society who yearns for his younger days. It won Best Short Film at Sundance in 1999.

IBM's record-setting stop-motion film made by moving individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, illustrating atomic-scale memory research.