AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge
OK, so Amazon was serious: $40k just thrown at first Studio projects As we reported here, the online retail juggernaut announced a while back that it was going to fund TV-type shows. Now, Amazon Studios has revealed the first four projects it’s giving 10 grand each in development funding. They are “Magic Monkey Billionaire” (above), an animated series which is hoped to deliver Itchy & Scratchy-esque LOLs; “Doomsday” and “The 100 Deaths of Mort Grimley”, the former being a “laugh out loud mockumentary” and the latter a “dark animated comedy” (all quotes from Amazon Studios’ own blog, linked to above: includes links to each projects’ bibles, if you’re interested). Not forgetting the only kids’ pick of the crop, “Buck Plaidsheep” seems to take an animated superhero slant on Sean the Sheep. Sort of. More important than the ten smackeroonies each is the promise for each IP to become a full-blown series, should it test well on Amazon’s VOD network. TV’s future in the making, anyone?

OK, so Amazon was serious: $40k just thrown at first Studio projects

As we reported here, the online retail juggernaut announced a while back that it was going to fund TV-type shows. Now, Amazon Studios has revealed the first four projects it’s giving 10 grand each in development funding. They are “Magic Monkey Billionaire” (above), an animated series which is hoped to deliver Itchy & Scratchy-esque LOLs; “Doomsday” and “The 100 Deaths of Mort Grimley”, the former being a “laugh out loud mockumentary” and the latter a “dark animated comedy” (all quotes from Amazon Studios’ own blog, linked to above: includes links to each projects’ bibles, if you’re interested).

Not forgetting the only kids’ pick of the crop, “Buck Plaidsheep” seems to take an animated superhero slant on Sean the Sheep. Sort of.

More important than the ten smackeroonies each is the promise for each IP to become a full-blown series, should it test well on Amazon’s VOD network. TV’s future in the making, anyone?

MIT’s T(ether) tactile AR is all kinds of awesomeness

Remember Wild Palms? Way back in the 90s, Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow, James Belushi and a few others made a sci-fi series where TV had become holograms projected into your living room. The freaky part was you could take a drug which enabled you to touch and interact with said holograms, totally blurring the real/virtual divide and making lots of people crazy.

As a gamer, I’ve always longed for this to happen, whilst fearing it at the same time. Well, those clever chaps at MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group have just got very close. T(ether) allows you to manipulate virtual objects in real time… and space. You simply attach a dongle to your iPad, which interacts with a similar device on your glove. You then look ‘through’ the iPad to create and move blocks which seem like they’re really there.

Perhaps the most impressive part of the above demo is the multi-‘player’ aspect (from 3 min 30 secs into the video): two people can build a structure together, by looking through 2 iPads at the same area, and placing virtual blocks on top of each other. This collaborative aspect could well make T(ether) a killer app for people like animators, its creators hope. Fingers crossed it does that… and much more!

Source: FastCoCreate via Wired