3d illusion arts: Walyou

Walyou

LEGO Robot Helps Its Creator Cheat at Freemium iPad Games
Totoro Tattoo Is Absolutely Mindblowing
Your Car, The Arcade: Insert Coin To Drive
This Needs To Happen: Unofficial Nintendo LEGO Sets
Z-Machines Guitarist Employs 78 Fingers for the Perfect Riff

LEGO Robot Helps Its Creator Cheat at Freemium iPad Games

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 11:30 AM PDT

Three years after solving 100 Rubik cube puzzle while running in the London marathon, Uli Kilian, a senior art director at UK-based medical animation studio Random 42, built a LEGO robot that helps him make coins in freemium iPad games.

Mobile games are awesome until you discover that you need to spend some real-world money to unlock certain features. The alternative? Spending endless days trying to raise the gold necessary for building more structures or for buying more animals. The game in question is the iPad version of Jurassic Park Builder, a freemium app that can get quite frustrating if you decide not to pay for the extra features.

Kilian explained why he decided to build this LEGO Technics Arduino robot: “It’s a really nice game with nice graphics, but I thought you could easily automate the tapping.”

The builder also admitted to not having played with LEGO Technics since he was a child: “The last time I did anything with Lego was when I was eight, and I’ve never done anything with Technic. I heard about the [Arduino] boards two weeks before and I knew I was going on holiday. I’m a 3D artist so all the stuff I do is virtual and I really wanted to do something in the real world, and I’d never done anything with micro-controllers before.”

The reasons for frustration and what motivated Killian to automate the task were detailed next: “One [dino] is after five minutes — you tap him and get points. Another is every ten minutes; another every 15 minutes, and so on. But you might want to sleep. At that time, that’s when the automation kicks in. I put all the dinosaurs in one line [in the game's virtual park landscape] and then set the distance between them equally so the arm can move between them easily.”

Killian also explained that he would love to expand this project, but other aspects of his life that cannot be neglected prevent him to do that: “The trouble is I don’t have very much time. I have a baby boy at home and a great job doing 3D stuff. I have many ideas of how to make it better. The first would be to get it working in more directions, and make it quicker.”

Not long ago, a Flappy Bird robot was spotted on the Web, so Kilian is not exactly the first one to think about game automation. Still, this doesn’t mean that his approach isn’t impressive!

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Totoro Tattoo Is Absolutely Mindblowing

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 07:00 AM PDT

Say Totoro Tattoo many times. Pretty fun, isn’t it? But what’s more fun is looking at this amazing piece of art that a lucky gal got on her back.

If anyone ever had a reason to wear a tanktop or a bareback dress, that is this gal in the picture, sporting an incredible tattoo by Nika Samarina. This was first spotted in Geek Universe but plenty of other creations by the artist can be seen in her Deviantart, linked before.

Source: The Mary Sue

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Your Car, The Arcade: Insert Coin To Drive

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 06:00 AM PDT

People can get really creative in their free time, as this Mazda Miata proves: it’s been modified to only start after a quarter has been dropped in an arcade style slot.

The guys at Tofu Drift Van have gotten their hands dirty by acquiring a Mazda Miata, and modding it to create a drift car. That happens all the time, you might be saying, where is the geeky twist? Well, it’s coming! They rigged up the ignition so it starts only once you drop a quarter in the arcade style slot. Very classic! See it in action in the video below.

Source: Technabob

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This Needs To Happen: Unofficial Nintendo LEGO Sets

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 05:00 AM PDT

Pretty much everyone wishes (we know we do) that their favorite things would become LEGO sets, but that want has never been so bad as when we first laid eyes upon these.

As far as we know, Nintendo and LEGO have never formally collaborated on any LEGO sets, but we’d say that after seeing these projects that emerged at CUUSOO, we’d say that both companies need to at least have a serious conversation.

Several projects appear throughout the CUUSOO site (yeah, not all of these are from the same creators) proving that there is a demand for this type of thing, collectible LEGO versions of some of our favorite video games of all time.

If you browse around the site, you will find many of these projects sitting there, awaiting your support to eventually become a reality, so let’s go on and prove both Nintendo and LEGO that there’s a real interest in these!

Source: Geekosystem

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Z-Machines Guitarist Employs 78 Fingers for the Perfect Riff

Posted: 15 Apr 2014 12:15 PM PDT

Practice makes perfect, unless you are a robot, in which case it depends on the engineers who built and programmed you how great your performance on a stage is.

The greatest thing about robot bands is that there’s no limit for limbs and fingers. On one hand, that’s good since a greater range of tones and musical notes can be performed with less effort. On the other hand, the resulting music may be a bit overly-complex, on the bring of sounding like gibberish. Still, backed by a proper songwriter, a robot band could actually perform good music that evokes certain feelings in whoever listens to it.

The Z-Machines robot band is not particularly new, as roboticists from the University of Tokyo developed them last year. However, the engineers realized that their music writing skills leave a lot to be desired, so they launched a competition for songwriters who could make Z-Machines jam in a discernible way.

Tom Jenkinson (better known under the stage name Squarepusher), remarked the advantages a robot band has over its human counterparts: “The robot guitar player for example can play much faster than a human ever could, but there is no amplitude control. In the same way that you do when you write music for a human performer, these attributes have to be borne in mind—and a particular range of musical possibilities corresponds to those attributes. Consequently, in this project familiar instruments are used in ways which till now have been impossible.”

Below is a making-of video of the Music for Robots album that Squarepush wrote so that the robots could perform some real music.

Jenkinson initially wrote only one song for the robot band, Sad Robot Goes Funny, but soon enough, things escalated and he ended up writing an entire EP. The video for Sad Robot Goes Funny can be watched below.

That’s pretty much what a 78-fingered guitarist, a 22-armed drummer and a laser-using keyboard player can do if a creative mind is writing their music. I’m not sure if the Japanese engineers went exactly for this, but their robot band reminded me of the Animusic videos, which you should definitely watch on YouTube, if you have a few minutes (or rather hours) to spare.

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