virtual sets

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

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.

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.

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

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

World Builder is a short film by Bruce Branit in which a man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

The introductory lecture of Stephen Boyd's Stanford Convex Optimization I course (EE 364A). It outlines convex sets, functions and problems, and the course's coverage of least-squares, linear and semidefinite programming, duality and interior-point methods.