The Chances of Becoming a Movie Director

Many cineasts are dreaming of becoming a director. Few follow their dream and even less succeed. That makes one wonder: What are the chances of actually succeeding in this business?

CO2 Emissions of Nuclear Energy Generation

The discussion about the benefit of nuclear power for the global climate is kinda broken on both sides. Supporters keep claiming that nuclear power is “free of CO2”. The other side brings up claims like “nuclear power has a higher CO2 output than coal powered plants”. Both arguments are nonsense.

Dave: The Interactive Music Video Installation

Last semester, Erik and myself created an interactive music video installation called “Dave“. It was the – so far – most intense project I have done. Well, it was worth it. 🙂 We created the first installation of this kind that I know of. The recipient, surrounded by displays, can alter the course of the […]

Photoshop Tutorial: Painting Textures for 3D-Models

In the world of computer generated imagery, textures are… kinda important. 🙂 Painting good texture is an art by itself.

City liberated of advertisements: São Paulo

Advertising is more and more becoming an integrated part of our urban landscape. There’s almost no public place left without billboards or similar things. Some places even have a advertising overkill – a visual flood of billboards, flashing neon ads and more. São Paulo decided to make a rather drastic step to change this: Since […]

Factors that influence Your search engine ranking

How Google & Co. rank their search results is generally considered a mystery. For search engines, this is one of their most precious secrets. A whole industry called search engine optimization (SEO) emerged around this secret. SEOs try to look behind the secret and optimize web sites to the factors which they think influence the […]

Worlds between Books and Movies: Visual Novels

Visual Novels are a kind of story which is primarily common in Japan. Unlike usual novels, they are enhanced by graphics and sound. Being an electronic medium, they can only be read on computers or other interactive multimedial devices.

Saving the Climate by storing CO2

The public discussion about the change of climate is quite active. Usually, the central question is how we can reduce the CO2 output. Another question is mentioned rather seldomly: Can’t already emitted CO2 just be stored away so that it can’t do any harm to the climate?

Floating MP3-Player: Music for your bath tub

JVC Japan presented an MP3-Player which floats in water. The JVC XA-AW33 (shiny name…) is waterproof and equiped with circular LED lighting for visualization effects. The manufacturer even claims that the music creates ripples in the water while playing music. Unfortunately, the floating player can only load 256MB of music and plays music in mono. […]

Never oversleep your alarm clock again

When people oversleep, there is one popular cause: They turn off their alarm clock and doze off again. Since the invention of the snooze button, many people also tend to keep snoozing for hours. 🙂 To escape this fate, I usually place a second alarm clock at the other end of my room. That forces […]