2010 on Stuff

China sculpture for one million Audis

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:34:56 +0000

This was a temporary sculpture built for a ceremony to celebrate the millionth Audi made in China.

The structure was an icosahedral core with twenty triangular steel ‘arms’ and twelve tubular steel ‘spikes’.

Alfa Romeo sculpture at Goodwood Festival of Speed

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:34:56 +0000

The Alfa Romeo sculpture at the 2010 Goodwood festival of Speed was two loops of steel tube tied into a ‘bow’.

Although it appears to be a freeform curve, the shape consists of eight planar curves, each of which are formed from three fixed radii rolled tubes welded together. This involved writing some code to convert arbitrary splines into a ‘triarc’ compound curve – Don’t do this, it is easier to recursively divide a spline into pairs and fit ‘biarc’ compound curves.

Alfa Romeo sculpture at Goodwood Festival of Speed

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:34:56 +0000

The Alfa Romeo sculpture at the 2010 Goodwood festival of Speed was two loops of steel tube tied into a ‘bow’.

Pannini article in New Scientist

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 11:34:56 +0000

New scientist printed an article on the Pannini paper that Tom Sharpless, Daniel German and myself produced, the online version is better and even manages to include my name.

Here is the article from the magazine version:

CAe paper - Pannini: A New Projection for Rendering Wide Angle Perspective Images

Mon, 31 May 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Daniel presented the paper on the Pannini projection at Computational Aesthetics 2010. Here is the full abstract:

The widely used rectilinear perspective projection cannot render realistic looking flat views with fields of view much wider than 70°. Yet 18th century artists known as ‘view painters’ depicted wider architectural scenes without visible perspective distortion. We have found no written records of how they did that, however, quantitative analysis of several works suggests that the key is a system for compressing horizontal angles while preserving certain straight lines important for the perspective illusion.

Sheffield Gigapixel

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 11:34:56 +0000

This is a zoomable Gigapixel panorama of Sheffield taken from Parkwood Springs near the ski-slope. The picture is stitched with the Hugin panorama stitcher, and is itself 1.6 gigapixels but most of these pixels are sky. It still has a lot of detail, you can (just about) read the time on the town hall clock and at least three other clocks. Unfortunately it was raining and the light was fading, it would be nice to do a series of Sheffield from different vantage points.