Find: Famous Subway Maps, Reimagined as Vintage Super Mario Brothers Games

What is it about this that is so compelling?

Maybe maps should be more fun. 

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Famous Subway Maps, Reimagined as Vintage Super Mario Brothers Games
// Latest Posts | The Atlantic Cities

Combining the systematic designs of urban transit systems with a bit of 1980s video gaming nostalgia, graphic designer Dave Delisle of Dave's Geeky Ideas has designed a series of metro maps implanted into the aesthetic of the classic video game Super Mario Brothers 3—which the designer has labeled "Mariotography."

In Delisle's schematics, graphic designer Lance Wyman's famous map of the D.C. metro, among other famous designs, are retrofitted with the video game's archetypal 8-bit landscapes of toadstools, Koopa Troopas, and, of course, Peach's Castle. Imagine traversing the Forest of Illusion while heading to downtown Montreal!


Métro de Montréal

While circles and shapes often indicate transfer stations and terminals on many subway maps, the recognizable symbol for Super Mario World's dungeons and Princess Peach's Castle—the immediately recognizable impetus for Mario's journeys—are substituted for the former and the latter. On a few station terminals, you can see the familiar SOS speech balloon from Peach herself. The famous green plumbing pipes that allow Mario to traverse between levels in the video game stand in as symbols for connecting commuter rails.


Washington Metro

Delisle also translates the logos of city transit systems to fit with the aesthetic, as though each system is the name for different Mario world. The Washington Metro becomes "Super Metro," Atlanta's MARTA features its tri-color stripes and the confident Mario iteration used when completing a level, while Portland's Tri-Met light rail dons the sizzling Fire Flower.


San Francisco BART

For San Francisco's BART system, Delisle changes the design entirely to that of Super Mario Kart to cleverly layout the routes of MARIO BART.


Toronto TTC/Subway RT

Delisle's highly-detailed maps have been a smash with both gamers and designers, spawning similar versions of the New York City Subway, Chicago "L", and the London Underground. They also have us wondering what the automated voices on subways cars would say for each: "Take the Orange Line to battle Bowser"? "Transfer here for Mushroom Kingdom"?

Dave Delisle's designs are available for purchase as posters on his website.


Portland TriMet


Atlanta MARTA


Calgary C-Train

This post originally appeared on Architizer, an Atlantic partner site.

Find: farewell, film. We'll always have Paris.

(Hello, computational photography)

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site
Anchorman 2 was Paramount’s final release on 35mm film
These old reels will go the way of the dinosaur.

According to unnamed industry executives speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Paramount has ceased releasing films on 35mm film and will go forward distributing movies exclusively in digital formats. The LA Times' sources said that Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues was the last Paramount movie with a celluloid release, and Wolf of Wall Street was the first major motion picture to be distributed entirely digitally.

The move has been a long time coming. Back in 2012, Ars reported that digital media research company IHS Screen Digest predicted that movie studios would cease producing 35mm film prints for major markets like the US, France, the UK, Japan, and Australia by the end of 2013. IHS also predicted that worldwide film distribution would cease by 2015.

The Los Angeles Times noted that Paramount has kept the landmark move quiet, possibly due to the fact that “no studio wants to be seen as the first to abandon film, which retains a cachet among purists.” Still, film prints can be up to twenty times as expensive to create and distribute as digital prints; the Times says a digital print can cost the studio $100, whereas a film print can sometimes cost $2,000 to make.

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Find: Google Research project turns 64 years of music into a rock rainbow


 
 
/ published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site
Google Research project turns 64 years of music into a rock rainbow

Google has compiled the last 64 years of musical history in a large, rainbow-colored chart for both education and the hope that you might buy some of it on the company's store. Today Google's Research group put out a new project called Music Timeline that tracks the popularity of musical genres dating all the way back to 1950. Users can track each individual genre as time goes by, and both view and buy key albums along the way.

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Find: Google to buy Nest for $3.2 billion

Pretty big deal. Experientially, not a good match. Does my search engine need to know which room I'm in at home? But google has always been interested in energy. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site
Google to buy Nest for $3.2 billion
Jacqui Cheng

Google announced on Monday that it has entered into an agreement to buy Nest Labs, Inc., makers of the Nest learning thermostat and Nest Protect, a connected smoke detector. The deal will cost Google $3.2 billion and should close in the next few months.

Nest has always been on Google's radar. Google Ventures, the company's startup investment arm, was one of the Nest's early investors. Google was previously rumored to be building a Nest thermostat competitor, and there were even leaked screenshots of a smart thermostat app built by Google called "EnergySense," which would let you control the temperature from a smartphone or Web client.

Now that Google is buying its main theoretical competition in this area, it's unclear what will happen to Google's internal projects. The one thing we do know is that the Nest brand will be sticking around, and the CEO of Nest, Tony Fadell, will continue to run the company as a separate division in Google.

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Find: Pebble Steel hopes to deliver the same experience in a new stylish body

Huge. 

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/ published on Ars Technica // visit site
Pebble Steel hopes to deliver the same experience in a new stylish body
Jason Inofuentes

When we last visited Pebble, we suspected that the startup was at least a few months away from updating its hardware. It turns out we were wrong. Announced today and available to order, Pebble is unveiling its latest revision, called Pebble Steel. Housing the same internal hardware (including the same e-paper display), Pebble Steel features a more traditional watch design while being smaller and thinner than the original.

The Pebble experience remains mostly unchanged. The same size display and identical internal silicon means developers have nothing to modify in their Pebble apps, though it launches with SDK 2.0 so apps based on earlier SDKs will be incompatible.

We had a few minutes to speak with Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky about the new hardware's development, and we were impressed to discover that work on a refreshed design started just after the original began shipping to Kickstarter backers. Early criticisms focused on the size of the device, particularly its length, and the inability to pair the device with dressier outfits. The original Pebble's design is unabashedly chunky, and the glossy plastic fits in well with jeans and a hoodie. Worn with a suit though, the Pebble stands out awkwardly. Pebble Steel, especially with an analog watch face, looks like a traditional watch.

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Find: New Oculus prototype features positional tracking, reduced motion blur

Interesting. Each image is spiked for just a few ms every 16 ms. This apparently reduces perceived blur due to retinal persistence: previous image doesn't overlap next. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site
New Oculus prototype features positional tracking, reduced motion blur
Those white dots are key to making the new Rift prototype a huge leap over previous models.
Oculus

At CES this week, Oculus VR is showing off a new prototype of its Rift headset, dubbed “Crystal Cove,” that incorporates a camera-and-LED system for head tracking and a quick-switching OLED display to reduce motion blur and increase image persistence.

The white dots on the surface of the Crystal Cove prototype in the image above are actually tiny infrared LEDs that send out signals visible to a camera specially designed by Oculus. This data is integrated with the gyroscope data that’s been in previous Rift prototypes to track your head’s absolute position and orientation as you crane your neck and lean forward, back, and side to side.

It’s hard to overstate just how much this changes the Rift virtual reality experience. Now, if you see something interesting, you can actually lean in to zoom closer to it. If you want to see the side of something sitting just in front of you, you can lean forward and around it and turn your head to the side to get an entirely new viewpoint. The environment no longer shifts with you, so to speak, when you shift your head around, as it did with previous Rift prototypes. Instead, the environment stays rock still and your virtual viewpoint is all that changes.

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AMD Demonstrates "FreeSync", Free G-Sync Alternative, at CES 2014 [feedly]

Good. The competition begins. 

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// published on AnandTech // visit site
AMD Demonstrates "FreeSync", Free G-Sync Alternative, at CES 2014

AMD has been relatively silent on the topic of NVIDIA’s variable refresh rate G-Sync technology since its announcement last year. At this year’s CES however, AMD gave me a short demo of its version of the technology.

Using two Toshiba Satellite Click notebooks purchased at retail, without any hardware modifications, AMD demonstrated variable refresh rate technology. According to AMD, there’s been a push to bring variable refresh rate display panels to mobile for a while now in hopes of reducing power consumption (refreshing a display before new content is available wastes power, sort of the same reason we have panel self refresh displays). There’s apparently already a VESA standard for controlling VBLANK intervals. The GPU’s display engine needs to support it, as do the panel and display hardware itself. If all of the components support this spec however, then you can get what appears to be the equivalent of G-Sync without any extra hardware.

In the case of the Toshiba Satellite Click, the panel already supports variable VBLANK. AMD’s display engines have supported variable VBLANK for a couple of generations, and that extends all the way down to APUs. The Satellite Click in question uses AMD’s low cost Kabini APU, which already has the requisite hardware to support variable VBLANK and thus variable display refresh rates (Kaveri as well as AMD's latest GPUs should support it as well). AMD simply needed driver support for controlling VBLANK timing, which is present in the latest Catalyst drivers. AMD hasn’t yet exposed any of the controls to end users, but all of the pieces in this demo are ready and already available.

The next step was to write a little demo app that could show it working. In the video below both systems have V-Sync enabled, but the machine on the right is taking advantage of variable VBLANK intervals. Just like I did in our G-Sync review, I took a 720p60 video of both screens and slowed it down to make it easier to see the stuttering you get with V-Sync On when your content has a variable frame rate. AMD doesn’t want to charge for this technology since it’s already a part of a spec that it has implemented (and shouldn’t require a hardware change to those panels that support the spec), hence the current working name “FreeSync”.

AMD’s demo isn’t quite as nice as NVIDIA’s swinging pendulum, and we obviously weren’t able to test anywhere near as many scenarios, but this one is a good starting point. The system on the left is limited to 30 fps given the heavy workload and v-sync being on, while the system on the right is able to vary its frame rate and synchronize presenting each frame to the display's refresh rate. AMD isn’t ready to productize this nor does it have a public go to market strategy, but my guess is we’ll see more panel vendors encouraged to include support for variable VBLANK and perhaps an eventual AMD driver update that enables control over this function.

In our review I was pretty pleased with G-Sync. I’d be even more pleased if all panels/systems supported it. AMD’s “FreeSync” seems like a step in that direction (and a sensible one too that doesn’t require any additional hardware). If variable VBLANK control is indeed integrated into all modern AMD GPUs, that means the Xbox One and PS4 should also have support for this. Given G-Sync’s sweet spot at between 40 - 60 fps, I feel like “FreeSync” would be a big win for AMD’s APUs.

Find: Netflix's genre tags - a perfect example of experience analytics


 
// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site
A quantum theory of Netflix's genre tags

Netflix's extraordinarily specific micro-categories have become both a running joke and a surprisingly effective recommendation tool, but how does it serve up personalized recommendations for "violent sci-fi thrillers" and "gory action and adventure," and why are "violent" and "gory" separate descriptors? And why, when you reverse-engineer Netflix categories as Ian Bogost and Alexis Madrigal did for The Atlantic, are there 19 genres dedicated to the man who played Perry Mason? By scraping the tens of thousands of possible Netflix categories (most of which users will never see), Bogost and Madrigal put together a strangely effective map of how Hollywood makes movies and how we seek them. And behind it all is Todd Yellin, the Netflix VP...

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