virtual machines

Cliff Click, author of HotSpot's JIT compiler, shares hard-won advice for people writing virtual machines at the VMSS16 workshop. Topics include interpreters, JITs and performance lessons.

An episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines that explains how a washing machine works, using models, cut-aways and animations. It was first aired in 1988.

ILM shows how The Mandalorian season one used a large curved LED wall to display interactive 3D environments in camera. The video covers the virtual production setup replacing location shoots.

Insider explains how The Mandalorian replaced green screens with LED walls that project real-time 3D environments behind actors, with over half the show filmed on such virtual sets.

A talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

Pete Hunt explains why React's virtual DOM was built, how it compares with databinding-style systems, and what it means for future browser technology. Recorded at FutureJS 2014 in Barcelona.

Part 1 of an episode of the British educational TV series The Secret Life of Machines, about how vacuum cleaners work and their history. It mixes humor with explanation of household technology.

A Curry On talk by Lars Bak, known for V8 and Dart, on building a secure and robust IoT development platform. It discusses language and VM design choices for small devices.

Brian Karis's SIGGRAPH 2021 talk explains how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite virtualized geometry works. It covers mesh import, the data structures, streaming, decompression, culling, software and hardware rasterization, and shading.

Johnny Harris investigates why McDonald's ice cream machines are so often broken, covering the Taylor machines, the repair restrictions on franchisees and the Kytch workaround device.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

Tim Hunkin's 1987 TV series episode on how vacuum cleaners and related household machines work, remastered and upscaled in 2021. It is part of the six-episode 'Secret Life of Machines' series with hands-on demonstrations of everyday technology.

Stargate Studios' 2009 virtual backlot reel shows before-and-after shots in which green screen and compositing replace locations in ordinary TV dramas and comedies. It shows how much of a seemingly real show is computer generated.

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

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 QCon London 2020 talk by Tesla engineers on the architecture of Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. It covers aggregating distributed batteries and solar with vertically integrated hardware and software across cloud and edge.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.

A restored 1994 video of Karl Sims' research on evolved virtual creatures, where simulated block creatures are bred through artificial evolution to swim, walk, follow and compete. It is a landmark demonstration of genetic algorithms in physics simulation.

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

Level1Techs' Wendell shows Intel's Flex 170 GPU providing GPU-accelerated virtual desktops on Proxmox 8.1 without subscription licensing, using SR-IOV, and demonstrates many desktop instances running at once.

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.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

In this 2019 GDC talk, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott explain how they flooded the app stores with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games to find the lowest bar for success. They tour the dark side of the mobile app market.

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

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

Mitchell Hashimoto walks through his setup for running a NixOS virtual machine on a Mac as his development environment, with a config repo on GitHub.

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.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

Tom Dale explains the internals of the Glimmer VM, Ember's rendering engine, which compiles templates to opcodes. The talk includes a performance benchmark demo.

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

Bryan Cantrill's Velocity NYC 2015 talk argues for running containers directly on bare metal rather than layering them on virtual machines. He covers the history of containers and how SmartOS runs Linux workloads via syscall emulation.

CNBC gets a tour of ASML's cleanrooms in the Netherlands to see how its roughly $200 million EUV lithography machines are built. It covers exploding molten tin, ultra-flat optics and why only one company can make these systems.

A 70-minute video essay by Jimmy McGee on gambling, addiction and game design, tracing horse racing, slot machines and collectible card markets. It is the first in a series on making money from games.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

Micah Lee's Circle of HOPE 2018 talk on Qubes OS, which isolates activities in separate virtual machines so one compromise, such as a bad PDF or USB stick, does not expose everything. He gives an overview timed around the Qubes 4.0 release.

Kalman Reti, one of the last Symbolics developers, gives a roughly hour-long talk on Symbolics Lisp machines. It covers the machines and their environment from an insider's perspective.

A roughly 14-minute interview with OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt at ruBSD 2013. He talks about making painful changes, getting real feedback, mitigation techniques compared to other OSs, and virtualization.

Veritasium short showing Drew Berry's scientifically accurate animations of the molecular machines that drive cell division. It walks through mitosis, chromosomes and motor proteins.