Lifeboat Foundation

Creating believable characters using high-quality character shader techniques, data scans of Actors, and improved geometry workflow.

The planes of the future may have flapping wings. 😃

Is it a bird, is it a plane? Well, this new Airbus prototype aircraft is kind of both.

Continue reading “Airbus Tests Bird-Like Flapping Wings For Its Future Aircraft” »

This starts at 10AM Eastern time Oct. 22, for anyone wants to watch this.

Boston Dynamics has reportedly already sold more than 250 of its $75,000 Spot robots since starting commercial sales back in June. Interested and deep-pocketed parties can purchase one directly from the company’s website as well as a host of accessories, from $1,650 charging bricks to $34,570 lidar and camera kits. But one add-on which we’ve seen Spot with since some of its earliest demo videos was the prehensile arm sprouting from between its shoulder blades. But come next January, Spots around the world are going to get a whole lot more handsy.

“The next thing on the future Spot is that we’re going to make it available with a robot arm in a few months,” Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert told the virtual crowd at the Collision from Home conference in June. “We have prototypes working, but we don’t have them available as a product yet. Once you have an arm on a robot, it becomes a mobile manipulation system. It really opens up just vast horizons on things robots can do. I believe that the mobility of the robot will contribute to the dexterity of the robot in ways that we just don’t get with current fixed factory automation.”

Circa 2016

Never let anyone crush your dreams. Last week the results of a University of Cambridge study spread through the news, claiming that the dream of Spider-Man-like abilities for humans is simply impossible. By their reasoning, sticky pads need to scale up in order to support increased weight, and as a result, the size of a gecko is about as big as a vertical climber can be. The only problem? An engineer at Stanford showed off a way around that problem back in 2014. Now Elliot Hawkes has dropped a diss track on YouTube firing shots at Cambridge and Stephen Colbert, showing off his climbing skills thanks to a “Gecko Glove.”

Continue reading “Stanford’s ‘Gecko Glove’ makes Spider-Man climbing possible” »

Improvements help the technique rival x-ray crystallography.

Circa 2013

A large variety of modern components and products such as fuel injectors and spinning nozzles require holes drilled to very high standards as fare as roundness, diameter and aspect ratio are concerned. Laser-beam helical drilling has shown great promise to produce such high quality micro holes. In helical drilling, the laser beam is rotated relative to the work piece. In this case, the rotational movement is produced using a Dove prism, mounted in a high speed, hollow shaft motor. Different kind of holes are drilled and investigated with respect to hole-quality and drilling time.

This mask could replace traditional N95.

He built a rollercoaster in his backyard.

This guy built a fully functional rollercoaster in his backyard 😱 🎢.