Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged pixar

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Pixar's Cars 2 spy story drives film animation to new heights | Film | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rives-animation-to-new-heights

animation pixar car movie

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Walt Disney's Pixar studios has devised "mind-blowing" technology that will make the film – a fast-moving spy story with anthropomorphised cars as characters – its most challenging and complex yet. Director John Lasseter, who shot to fame in 1995 with Toy Story, the first feature-length computer animated film, said: "The level of complexity in Cars 2 is 10 times what we've been able to put into any other film.
  • With Cars 2, Lasseter said, the creative team had developed computer programs to convey mathematically the physics of the natural world, using algorithms to create ocean swells and waves with depth, volume and interacting light.
  • "We've had a lot of people say, did you use photography of real water somehow?" he said, describing the latest advances as "mind-blowing".
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In the film, which is the sequel to the 2006 hit Cars, artists have recreated the minutiae of city life, from dirt in gutters and weeds growing in cracks to the patina on weathered buildings. Each frame took an average of 13 hours to complete, double the previous time
  • For one scene involving a chase around London, Pixar created nearly 20 miles of "landscape and environment". Apurva Shah, supervising technical designer, said: "We started with the actual map and layout of London. Even though our world is very caricatured, we wanted it to be as true as possible."
Javier E

A Wi-Fi Barbie Doll With the Soul of Siri - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oll-with-the-soul-of-siri.html

toy interactive dialogue children industry

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University, for instance, compared two groups of toddlers. One group played with plush toys that had been preprogrammed to say the child’s name, and to say that they had the same favorite food and song as the child; the other played with plush toys that called each child “Pal” and liked different things. When the same toy character on-screen presented math skills — like arranging cups in order of size — the first group of toddlers performed better than those who played with less-personalized plush toys
  • toys able to personalize their responses to children in real time could have an even greater effect on them.
  • Mr. Jacob hit upon the idea of developing conversational characters for children a few years ago after his daughter Toby, then 7, asked him if she could use Skype to talk to her stuffed animals. He had previously worked as the chief technology officer at Pixar Animation Studios. So he talked over the possibility with a former Pixar colleague, Martin Reddy. They decided to start ToyTalk.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • To develop a system that could both understand a child’s comments and say something engaging back, the company built its own platform to process spoken language — one tailored to the pitch of children’s voices, their prosody and vocabulary. Now, for instance, when a child says “totes jelly” to a ToyTalk app, the language processor understands the phrase actually means: “I’m totally jealous.
  • The company also spent months testing out jokes, songs, rhymes and questions on focus groups of children to develop conversational characters complete with their own biographies and story arcs. Mr. Jacob sees creating conversation trees for these characters as a new art form, neither film nor video game.
  • the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group in Boston, asked Mattel to shelve the talking doll. The group said the voice recordings amounted to “eavesdropping” and could be used to exploit the intimate feelings of children. “Whatever the child says will be manipulated and used to insinuate these dolls further into girls’ lives,” said Susan Linn, the group’s director.
  • Mattel said the company was “committed to safety and security” and that Hello Barbie’s technology included “a number of safeguards to ensure that stored data is secure and can’t be accessed by unauthorized users.”
  • If ToyTalk has any influence, however, Hello Barbie, rather than dooming children’s privacy, could just as well usher in a new era of interactive playthings where children can develop elaborate conversations with toys similar to the way Minecraft players build out entire landscapes.
  • Of course, society may not be ready for children en masse seeking illusory relationships with intelligent devices — even if they are just mimicking their parents
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page