Birth of a Dinosaur.

These are wonderful! From Kestrel, click for full size.

So, first pic: the eggs, which has been pipped, and some sections of the shell have broken away. The inmate has made a little tear in the membrane. The other items you can see in there are hatched chicks, and in the left lower part of the incubator, that square thing is the hygrometer.

Now the beak emerges from the tear.

One of the siblings has come by and is about to trip and fall over the new hatchling, and then fall asleep, delaying things a bit.

Almost out, after the sibling has staggered off somewhere else!

Finally the creature emerges, ready to eat Tokyo. Or some chick crumbles, anyway.

© Kestrel, all rights reserved.

Moody.

From rq: That’s the river Daugava upstream from us, near a historical castle ruin and what used to be a rather sheer cliff into a narrow, shallow river. The hydro dams went up in the 60s and 70s, so most of the river is broad and slow these days. At least, on the surface… Click for full size!

© rq, all rights reserved.

Emotion Capture.

The setup consists of 40 Nikon DSLR cameras and two large light diffusion lamps. Photo: @lovesickfrankie.

The future of avatars is here.

How exactly does one become an emotionally competent and reactionary 3D avatar of oneself? I found myself in the midst of precisely 40 DSLR cameras strapped onto poles aimed at my face, with a heavy weight atop of my head, while going through a series of emotions and sounds I wasn’t aware I was capable of. Not exactly a scene from a Tarkovsky film, but not unlike other ventures into life-like technology.

Recently, London live-event design company Immersive presented a new technology created by Expressive AI called Emotion Capture, where, as demonstrated in the above process, avatars are created to be emotionally responsive and as human-like as possible.

You can see and read all about this at The Creators Project.