ExpanDrive

via Wired

Aspiring scientists from the Zurich School of Applied Sciences have built a video simulation that displays the flight path of every commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period. There isn’t much of an application for it, but it sure is cool to look at.

Sure is.

Just to give a taste of the sorts of things Jeff and I have worked on outside of Magnetk, my SIGGRAPH paper about an interactive preview rendering system I’ve been building with Industrial Light & Magic and Tippett Studio just made the top story on MIT Technology Review:

We recently added a screencast to the front page of SftpDrive.com, it’s a good place to start if you’re not entirely sure what SftpDrive does or what it is different.

Screencasts are an incredible way of cleary conveying what a program does or how it is supposed to be used. It allows you to walk anyone through a complex sequence of events at a specifically chosen pace and add however much additional instruction or annotation that is needed.

The tough part is making them. You’re often confronted with a choice between a small file with blurry images or a gigantic file that is still imperfect. To get it right requires some experience and finesse. You’ll probably also want some expensive software if you’re going to do a real bang up job. Forget about all the effort it takes to learn how to use it.

What if you want to just make a simple screencast and not have it suck? I thought I’d write a bit on how we attempted to achieve that lofty goal. (more…)