mosaic
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See every square foot of asteroid Bennu, Earth's little frenemy
Bennu has the distinction of being the subject of the highest resolution mosaic ever made of any planetary body.
HBO's interactive 'Mosaic' series arrives on Android
Despite all the high profile TV shows currently on the air, HBO and Steven Soderbergh have found a way to make Mosaic stand out in the age of binge-watching: hand over narrative control to the viewers. Billed as "interactive storytelling," the 7.5-hour series starring Sharon Stone debuted earlier this month on iPhone/Apple TV, and is now available for Android users as well. You won't decide the show's outcome, but you can choose how to watch it across 15 chapters, with multiple perspectives available depending on which character you may be following. If you want to go back and see things in another order, or from another angle, that's possible too, and there's additional content available for any story elements that need a deeper dive. Soderbergh's six-episode cut of Mosaic will debut on HBO January 22nd, in case you'd like to see how your version matches up.
Soderbergh's experimental 'Mosaic' HBO series hits iPhone and Apple TV
Director Steven Soderbergh has made a name for himself by pushing cinematic boundaries, so it's no surprise that his upcoming series for HBO, Mosaic, isn't your usual TV fare. Today, he's launching the Mosaic app on iPhone and Apple TV (with Android and web versions to follow soon), which will let you decide how you watch the show. It's not quite "choose your own adventure," since you're not making any decisions on the show's outcome. Instead, the app, which was developed by PodOp, lets you determine how Mosaic's narrative flows.
Steven Soderbergh's 'Mosaic' app lets you choose a show's narrative
Many TV shows have apps, but they're usually meant as nothing more than companions that encourage you to tune in. What if you could actually choose how the story is presented? Steven Soderbergh is trying just that. His upcoming HBO miniseries Mosaic will be accompanied by iOS app that gives you control over a branching narrative, letting you change how the story is told. And this isn't just a conventional show cut up into pieces. Soderbergh says he produced the story with the app in mind, and there are even different conclusions. While it won't be a Choose Your Own Adventure experience with big-name actors (Sharon Stone, Beau Bridges and Paul Reubens are part of the cast), it's likely as close as you'll get for a long while.
The Sistine Chapel's masterpiece frescoes have been digitized
To prepare for future restoration projects, the Sistine Chapel's world-famous frescoes and mosaic floor have gotten the up-close-and-personal treatment by way of an army of DSLRs. The last time the Sistine's masterworks were documented photographically (both by Michelangelo and other artists) it was a 14-year-long job that wrapped in 1994, according to Reuters. This time out, photographers spread 65 nights of work across five years, resulting in 270,000 digital still photos.
The mysterious existential dread of Krillbite's 'Mosaic'
Adrian Husby and Martin Kvale have been working together since 2011, when they were finishing up their bachelor's degrees in Norway. That's when they began conceptualizing Among the Sleep, a surreal first-person horror game that puts players in the shoes of a toddler, waddling around a suburban house at night as stranger and stranger things creep through the floorboards. With their studio Krillbite, they released Among the Sleep in 2014. It was a hit, selling well across PCs and consoles and garnering a handful of awards. Today, Husby and Kvale are hard at work on their new project, Mosaic. It's a mysterious, atmospheric game that retains Krillbite's trademark creepy vibe. They only want to tease Mosaic for now; they don't want to give too much away before its expected release on PC and PlayStation 4 in late 2017. As they attempt to describe Mosaic while maintaining its mystery, Husby and Kvale play off each other as old friends do.
The world's largest Pokemon card is actually 13,000 cards in one
Pikachu has evolved once again -- this time into a massive mosaic featuring his original pose as drawn by famed Pokémon illustrator Ken Sugimori. The mosaic is 32 feet tall, 23 feet wide and it's created out of 12,987 individual Pokémon trading cards. And yes, you better believe that's a new record for trading-card mosaic art. British artist Quentin Devine completed the work as part of The Pokémon Company's year-long 20th anniversary celebration of the Pokémon franchise. Devine previously made a mosaic of the Mona Lisa entirely out of fan self-portraits, and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II using penny coins.
Pew Research: You know the internet, but you might not 'get' it
Given how ubiquitous smart devices are, one might think that, overall, people would have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of tech. That isn't exactly the case. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 60 percent of the representative sample knew that tweets are limited to 140 characters, but only 42 percent knew that Harvard is where Facebook originated. And despite how much new iPhone announcements dominate the news cycle, only some 36 percent correctly picked 2007 as the year Apple unveiled its first smartphone. Even fewer were able to accurately identify the first "widely popular graphical web browser." Hint: it wasn't Netscape Navigator. As The Washington Post points out, a vast majority of people happen to think that "World Wide Web" and "internet" are interchangeable too.
Jukebox Heroes: World of Warcraft's Mosaic soundtrack
If you were one of the lucky ducks who went to BlizzCon in 2009 and you were a soundtrack fan, then life smiled upon you. It was there and there only that Blizzard sold a now-rare World of Warcraft soundtrack called Mosaic. I guess "Mosaic" sounded better than "Leftovers," although that's really what it was: a collection of leftover tracks that hadn't been included in an official WoW soundtrack to date. The amazing thing is, Mosaic is quite good -- better, I think, than The Burning Crusade. I was pretty shocked to discover it a year or so ago, although I wasn't as shocked considering how much I've come to realize that studios just don't put out a lot of their game's music. So what we have here is a hodge-podge of 16 tracks ranging from the silly to the sublime. They might not be as famous as some of the featured tunes from the other soundtracks, but chances are that if you played WoW, you'll recognize them even so. Here are my picks for the best of the litter.
Stop-motion music video relies on OpenOffice and Excel, finds formula for success (video)
It's already considered a grind to produce stop-motion video -- imagine creating a clip using the spreadsheet app that many dread seeing at work every morning. Joe Penna, better known to the internet as Mystery Guitar Man, isn't afraid. He and his team recorded a performance against a greenscreen, gave the video a mosaic look in After Effects and proceeded to recreate 730 of the frames in OpenOffice (and occasionally Excel)... by hand. We don't want to know how long it took Penna and crew to wrap up their work, but the result is probably the liveliest you'll ever get out of an app meant for invoices and corporate expenses. The fully produced video is above; click past the story break if you want to smash illusions and see how the pixelated rumba came to be.
Mozilla plans war on fragmentation, reveals unified UI design for Windows 8 and mobile devices
Mozilla has shown off ideas for future versions of Firefox as it becomes less of a traditional browser and more of a "soft, friendly, human" ecosystem. Slides released on the web hint at a new desktop environ with a simplified menu, cleaner download interface, and a more functional startpage -- all the while maintaining the same curved-edge look as the mobile variant. A Windows 8 Metro tile-based version is also in the works that's similar to the Firefox tab layout on Android. There's no word when Mozilla's so-called Kilimanjaro project will come to fruition, but you can check out the slideshow after the break for an early glimpse.
Visualized: an interactive timeline of the web
Ever wondered what the World Wide Web's illustrious history would look like if plotted in timeline form? Well, thanks to Google's "Evolution of the web," you won't have to. The delectable chart traces the evolution of HTML, the web technologies that came alongside it and the browsers that've held it all together -- all in a seriously meta HTML5 package. Ready for a trip down memory lane? Hit the source, friend, and revel at how far we've come.
DirecTV Masters Mix channel gets a few new twists for 2011 golf tournament
The 2011 iteration of DirecTV's multiview style Masters Mosaic channel has been lightly refreshed with two new channels and extended coverage. The channel itself will for the first time be available 24 hours a day during the Masters Tournament for those who want to keep up on the stats and highlights, while there's also an extra hour of coverage from ESPN on Thursday and Friday. The stats themselves have been expanded to pull down an individual player's performance on demand. As seen above, the Masters Mix channel itself has a new look, plus the new Additional Featured Group and Masters In-Depth channels. The full press release with all the details is after the break, or hit the source links DirecTV's minisite to see more screenshots plus demo video, and ESPN's coverage breakdown including 3D.
Cablevision lets viewers watch 9 channels at once with new iO TV Quick Views
Cablevision launched its Quick View feature back in 2009 that displayed an array of channels in various categories all at once, but now it's updated that by allowing users to pick two, six or nine channels they want to watch and move through at once. Handy if you're watching multiple live events at once -- like March Madness -- or just want to have a PiP or two while you're waiting for something to come on. AT&T's offered a similar feature for a while My Multiview, displaying up to four user selected channels at once. Each subscriber can create up to 20 personalized layouts, which can be found at channel 600. Powered by ActiveVideoNetworks' CloudTV, from the screens it doesn't look like the most beautiful app ever developed, but the function definitely merits checking out if you have the service.
Tribune's Mosaic app brings elegant media aggregation to Windows 7 tablets, soon to Windows Phone 7
Tribune is hardly the first media monolith to try something like this, but the more the merrier, right? And for once, a company's out to provide an elegant, useful news aggregator for a platform not named iOS. Mosaic is a fresh piece of software, designed to pull together news and information from all sorts of sources onto Windows 7-based tablets. At least, that's what we're guessing. According to the official press release, it'll be available for use "with Microsoft's Windows 7 Mobile-based tablets" starting on January 31st, and unless the folks in Redmond have yet another OS up their sleeve, we're guessing they simply mean Win7 slates. Furthermore, a companion app for Windows Phone 7, iPad and Android will be following shortly, and it sure sounds as if both versions will be completely gratis.
Steve Jobs portrait made out of Apple products mosaic
As reported by MacStories and created for Italian magazine Panorama by Tsevis Visual Design, this picture of Apple CEO Steve Jobs is entirely made up of Apple's white products laid out to create a visually arresting portrait. The creative director of the magazine asked Tsevis for the "white on white" portrait and ran the image on the cover of the the financial section titled "Panorama Economy." Looking closely, one can see the incredible detail of the mosaic, which encompasses a large selection of products from Apple's history. After seeing how great the white on white version came out, the designer set out to make a version with a black background as well, and both of them are available for download under the Creative Commons License Scheme. Over on Flickr, you can access both the white version and the black version of the portrait. A few years ago we saw a colorful Apple product mosaic in the likeness of Steve Jobs from these guys, and we've also seen Steve Jobs in doll form, but I wonder -- do you think Steve will be hanging one of these new ones up in his office? [via MacStories]
What's taking the Battlecry mosaic so long?
When the World of Warcraft Anniversary mini-site was unveiled last November, one of its features was a photo-mosaic dubbed the Battlecry which would unlock little art goodies each time a certain milestone was reached. The Battlecry mosaic called for player submissions to submit their pictures with a logo of their favored faction, with a modest goal of 20,000 player-submitted pictures in order to reveal the final artwork created specially for the event. It's come along rather smoothly, and some really cool player pictures have been submitted, with the seeming abundance of Horde-aligned pictures prompting us to ask where the Alliance pride was. But what really surprises me is how long the whole project is taking. When the site was launched, one of the first questions that actually ran through my head was how long it would take to fill up the whole mosaic. With over ten million active players, you'd think getting to 20,000 would be easy. Out of ten million, that's like a drop in a bucket. But after almost two months of the site being active, we're still only at 32% of the goal. Why?
Fan pictures added to the Battlecry mosaic
We posted about Blizzard's Warcraft anniversary minisite a while back, and since then, they've been busy, filling it up with even more content. The community interviews and the new Blizzcast haven't yet appeared, but there are many, many pictures on the Battlecry mosaic submissions section. Pages and pages of fans showing their support for the Horde or the Alliance. It's quite a sight to see, actually -- the pictures range from the straightforward to the silly to the very involved (one couple's posed up with their t-shirts and Frostmourne and logo and everything). There's quite a few whole-guild pics too. There's 43 pages total, so it's a lot to look through, but it's definitely worth a browse. Ancilorn reminds us, also, that this is a contest -- as more and more pictures from each faction roll in, we'll have access to some mosaic art using these actual pictures, the first piece of which was just revealed today. They've featured some of their favorite pictures over on the Facebook page as well. This is turning out to be a pretty cool idea, and as I said in the original post, I bet we'll be seeing these pictures in lots of other places in the future.
Creative introduces toned-down ZEN Mozaic EZ300 PMP
We're not quite sure what all was wrong with the original ZEN Mozaic (Mosaic?), but evidently it demonstrated just a bit too much Mondrian. This go 'round, the ZEN Mozaic EZ300 ditches the hodgepodge of button colors and sticks strictly to pink or black, though most everything else remains the same. There's a 1.8-inch 160 x 128 resolution display, 4GB or 8GB of internal capacity, up to 32 hours of audio playback, MP3 / WMA / WAV / JPEG file support, an FM radio tuner, a five-band custom equalizer and USB 2.0 connectivity. It's available now for US and UK customers for $59.99 (4GB) / $79.99 (8GB). One more (big) look after the break.[Via PMP Today]
TapTapTap creates 10,000 iPhone apps mosaic
This is awesome. TapTapTap, in order to celebrate over 10,000 apps in the App Store, has created a mosaic of (what else?) an iPhone loaded up with apps -- out of the icons of App Store apps. It's crazy. You can see the entire thing full scale over on Flickr, and World of Apple is selling a poster of the image for $50 if you want to jump right over all the trouble of printing it out yourself..There are quite a few Apps I don't recognize in there, but I did notice the WebMD app, the Warcraft Characters app, Pyrus, NetNewsWire, and a few others I've got installed on my own iPhone. Very cool idea, and very neat way to show off just how many thousands of apps have arrived in the App Store already. Thanks, Alex!
