illusions
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RIFT reveals the second new soul for Storm Legion, the Tempest
Warriors in RIFT are usually all about hitting things with weapons. Sure, they drop in some variety, but the focus of the class has always been a strong set of swords or axes or whatever. And the newest soul revealed for the upcoming Storm Legion expansion continues the trend if you assume that "lightning" qualifies as a weapon. The Tempest has been unveiled and promises to bring strong electrical powers and massive thunderstorms ripped from the Plane of Air into the Warrior's hands. Tempests are versatile, able to attack from long range or channel lightning into a short-range destructive burst. They also possess illusory tricks to help evade defeat in the event that heavy armor isn't protection enough. Despite this, they're probably the least adept of all the Warrior souls at wielding non-lightning weapons, which means that another soul is necessary to provide hard-hitting weapon talents. Take a look at the introductory lore and early screenshots on the official reveal page, and keep your eyes peeled for the final two souls as the expansion nears release. [Thanks to Brad for the tip!]
Marco Tempest's magic show uses iPods to deceive and delight
Marco Tempest calls himself a "technoillusionist" -- he combines magic tricks with the technological artistry (and occasionally the black-turtlenecked panache) of Steve Jobs. We last saw him hacking through an augmented reality illusion; this time he's using three iPods to enable his trickery, as he offers a video essay on deception, lies, and magic. It's sort of like his take on F For Fake, with more touchscreens: see him call out liars, declare himself an honest magician, and lift a smiley face out of the display and into real life, all in the video above.
Invisibility cloak modified to make you see things that aren't there
The ever-evolving tale of the invisibility cloak makes us want to hang our heads in our hands sometimes, so fraught with frustrations does it seem. Well, another chapter's been added to the tome: researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have devised a way to extend the invisibility principle, allowing an illusion to sit in place of the invisible object. So, say you wanted to use an invisibility cloak to mask the presence of your bottle of beer on the table, the new concept -- or 'shroud of lies' as we call it -- would enable you to make it appear that there was a glass of water sitting there, in place of the beer. So how does that work, exactly? Normal, every day invisibility cloaks bend light around a central cavity, whereas the team has now worked out mathematical rules for bending light in other ways, allowing a material to be designed to bend light in the exact way a spoon would, so that the light hitting the material would distort, making it look like a spoon was there. Theoretically, all of this is rather simple and quite sound, though it turns out that there are numberless mechanical obstacles standing in the way of producing such devices. The new illusion-producing device would have to be capable of working without interfering with the invisibility cloak itself (which, if you recall, also can't properly be said to exist). There's no word on when any of this will ever come to fruition of course, but we remain always hopeful.
Widget Watch: Optical Illusion of the Day
If you're one for intentionally playing tricks on your own mind, Optical Illusion of the Day just might be your bag. It gets its magic from Mighty Optical Illusions, a blog about all things visual trickery. I've never seen the blog before, and I'm not exactly a fan of their plastering ads in the main content column above the fold, but these illusions are at least better than those darn 'can you see the image in this colored spot painting' things.
