virtual threads

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Giant Bomb interviews John Carmack at E3 2012 about his virtual reality head-mounted display prototype. He demos it and talks about latency, depth and focus problems in VR.

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

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.

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.

Luke Miani removes the screen from a MacBook Air and tests using it headless as the host for an Apple Vision Pro virtual display.

A video showing a virtual camera built in Blender that simulates lenses and film layers using path tracing, to make physically modeled photographs.

A Community clip in which Dean Pelton explores a virtual reality environment, including a blooper moment.

Walt Disney Animation Studios' short introduction to path tracing, showing how rays are traced and bounced through a virtual scene to simulate light. It explains how this approach is used in animated films.

A short satirical sketch in which a Q&A about web servers turns into a profane rant about threads, blocking and non-blocking I/O. It lampoons the hype around Node.js and async programming.

A short Channel NewsAsia interview clip in which MasterCard's Southeast Asia president voices distrust of cryptocurrencies produced by anonymous computers in anonymous places. It is part of the Perspectives series and runs about four minutes.

A Gamereactor interview at E3 2012 with John Carmack, who shows his lag-free head-mounted display running DOOM 3 BFG Edition. He discusses what the headset could mean for the games industry.

Innuendo Studios uses Phil Fish, creator of the game Fez, as a case study in internet celebrity. The essay argues that fame online works differently from traditional fame, and shows how audiences turn on the people they have elevated.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

CGP Grey explains that the City of London is a tiny, separate entity with its own governance, history and privileges, distinct from the city called London. He covers its financial role and how it is run.

CGP Grey explains first-past-the-post voting and why it pushes elections toward two dominant parties. It is the first in his series on electoral systems.

Veritasium examines the role of luck in success, with simulations and examples showing how small advantages and chance can compound. It argues that top outcomes are disproportionately luck-driven while still crediting effort.

Not Just Bikes explains how North American speed limits are set and why posted limits matter far less than street design. It argues that drivers follow the road's cues, so safe speeds have to be built into the street.

An RSA Animate drawn from a Sir Ken Robinson talk arguing that current education systems are modeled on the industrial age. It discusses divergent thinking, standardization, and how schools disengage kids.

CGP Grey argues for picking a theme for the year or season instead of setting goals or new year's resolutions. He explains how a theme gives direction without a pass/fail target.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

Not Just Bikes argues that urban noise comes mostly from motor vehicles, drawing on the book Curbing Traffic and a visit to Delft, a city that takes noise seriously.

CGP Grey argues that your brain treats a whole home as one room during lockdown, blurring work, rest and leisure. He recommends creating separate spaces and routines for different activities to stay balanced.

Kurzgesagt examines what individuals can do about climate change, covering lesser-known carbon sources and why systemic and political change matter more than personal footprints.

Kurzgesagt animates Andy Weir's short story The Egg, in which a person learns that they are every human who has ever lived. It adds music and narration to the original text.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

CGP Grey's sarcastic animated video adapted from the book How to Be Miserable, listing habits that reliably make people unhappy. By inverting the advice, it shows what to avoid and prompts reflection on goals and routines.

Veritasium explains why the one-way speed of light has never been measured, only the round-trip speed, since measuring it requires synchronized clocks that assume the answer. It explores the implications for relativity.

The Thought Emporium's host describes making and taking a DIY gene therapy to treat his own lactose intolerance. It uses an AAV virus to deliver DNA coding for the lactose-digesting enzyme, made with biohacker Gabriel Licina's help.

A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage. It frames Unix as a moonshot achievable by a small team.

CGP Grey explains split-brain patients, where severing the corpus callosum lets the two hemispheres act independently. He uses this to explore the idea of two minds in one head.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.