Within the swiftly shifting terrain of today’s digital ecosystem, innovative tools like ChatGPT have carved out a leading position at the vanguard of tech progress. These tools open the door to extraordinary prospects for enriching diverse facets of our work life as well as our private endeavors. For individuals who are eager to unlock and […]
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This guide is designed to show you how to learn Python with the help of Google Gemini. Python, recognized for its significant popularity within the programming community, is lauded for its exceptional readability, its adaptability across a myriad of applications, and its approachability for individuals taking their initial steps into the world of coding. The […]
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Google’s latest AI, Gemini Ultra 1.0, is stepping up to challenge OpenAI’s GPT-4, and the competition is heating up. These two AI systems are at the forefront of the industry, pushing the boundaries of what machines can do and how they can assist us in our daily tasks. At the heart of this technological showdown […]
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Even Instagram pivoted from photo to video content… and so should your renders! Sure, a JPG or PNG can be worth a thousand words, but think of how impactful product videos can be. KeyShot has always been at the forefront of the rendering industry, but with these new features, it aims to make video/animation just as easy as rendering images. The 2024 KeyShot Animation Challenge invites designers to explore KeyShot’s two most powerful animation tools – the Physics Simulation feature, and the Camera Keyframes feature.
These two tools unlock a vast array of possibilities – the Physics Simulation helps bring realism to your renders, letting you create falling/bouncing objects, colliding elements, and impactful scenes. Meanwhile, the Camera Keyframes tool allows you to go beyond the traditional zoom, pan, revolve movements and build a more unique and detailed camera path simply by adding keyframes and allowing the camera to glide between them. You can use either one or both tools in your submission to the challenge, which should be a video of 30 seconds maximum. The more imaginative the better.
Click Here to Participate in the 2024 KeyShot Animation Challenge. Hurry! Challenge ends March 10th, 2024.
Important Note: Finalists will be required to send their .ksp file, so be sure to save that in a safe place!
Challenge begins: February 8, 2024
Challenge ends: March 10, 2024
Gold Prize: KeyShot Pro Subscription + KeyShotWeb Subscription + Render showcased on KeyShot blog, Social Media, Newsletter and KeyShot startup window + A Will Gibbons Masterclass + Access to KeyShot Farms cloud rendering service for 1 week. (64-cores CPU or 1x RTX4090 GPU, value of $449.)
Silver Prize: KeyShot Pro Subscription + Render showcased on KeyShot blog, Social Media, Newsletter and KeyShot startup window + A Will Gibbons Masterclass
Bronze Prize: KeyShot Pro Subscription + Render showcased on KeyShot blog, Social Media, Newsletter and KeyShot startup window
Karim Merchant – Senior Industrial Design and Creative Specialist, KeyShot
Reza Tari – Marketing Design Manager, KeyShot
Jordan Doane – Creative Support Specialist, KeyShot
Learn about Physics Simulation and Camera Keyframes on the KeyShot YouTube channel. You can also dig into Animation in the KeyShot manual.
Need a model? Choose from thousands of models in the KeyShot Cloud Library.
Click Here to Participate in the 2024 KeyShot Animation Challenge. Hurry! Challenge ends March 10th, 2024.
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Valentine’s Day is coming soon, and if you’re someone who believes in making your own gifts for your partner, then it’s your lucky day! We’ve put together a dedicated list of craft supplies that will make gift making the easiest bit of Valentine’s Day. These handy tools and supplies will help you work effortlessly, creating the perfect little present for your partner. They’ll make the technical process of arts and crafts into a fun, efficient, and smooth experience. From lovely dual-tipped pens that create pretty patterns to sleek scissors made with lustrous Japanese steel – these are the ultimate craft supplies you need to make the ultimate V-Day gift.
Called the Scissors w/ Base, these innovative scissors feature a magnetic base making the design a unique and cutting-edge one, letting you completely reshape and rejuvenate your workspace organization.
The scissors’ magnet base is a complete game-changer, giving them a permanent VIP spot on your desk. They are made with lustrous Japanese steel and are an excellent tool to assemble a DIY gift for your partner on Valentine’s Day. Besides being handy tools, they’re also pretty cool desk decor.
Called the Levitating Pen, this good-looking writing accessory is a sleek pen with a Schmidt ballpoint cartridge which makes it easy and sturdy to hold, creating a smooth writing experience. Aesthetically, it brings to mind a spacecraft or something we would find in the Marvel universe, floating around in the galaxy, similar to how the pen floats at a 60-degree angle when resting in it’s specially designed stand.
The Levitating Pen can be positioned in its holder which is magnetized and can be kept floating in that position. You need to give the pen a simple twist, which makes it spin for a good 20 seconds, allowing you to interact with it.
Given the number of ASMR videos we have seen on Instagram that shows a person cutting everything from soap to foam, we know the value a good cutter has in our everyday life. Especially when creating crafts, a good cutter is a solid friend that will help you navigate those tight curves – which is exactly what this CraftMaster EDC Utility Knife does! It also comes with a scale on the side to make it easy to measure as you go when you lose your 10th ruler again.
The metal exterior is hefty, giving a solid holding grip that makes it easy to hold. The scale sports both metric and imperial markings so you can follow those DIY instructions with ease.
Dubbed the ClampTape, this innovative and amusing tape dispenser by Peleg Dispenser ensures you always have some tape handy. It features a clothespin-inspire design that clamps onto the tabletop surface, providing you with an instant tape dispenser.
The ClampTape is another ingenious design by Peleg Design, which combines emotional design with problem-solving abilities. It is cute and convenient, and is made from bent sheet metal, with a rubber/polymer sleeve wrapped around the clamping jaws, so it doesn’t cause any damage to your table.
Called the Everlasting All-Metal Pencil, this Wacom stylus has a tip that never needs to be sharpened or replaced. It is a unique pencil that let’s you focus entirely on your creative process, allowing you to build a beautiful DIY Valentine’s Day gift, instead of being bothered by the lead.
The pencil has an octagonal shaft which is made using aluminum, and it features a special alloy core. It does not leave heavy grooves on the paper, and instead it draws like a pencil, without the tip wearing down after dozens of marks.
Called the Japanese Memo Block, this little stationery item is designed to function as a temporary shelter for your itinerant thoughts. It’s great to pen down your intimate and affectionate thoughts or to write an adorable love letter for your partner on Valentine’s Day.
A blank sheet of paper is often the most freeing and welcoming item, as you are able to record your fleeting thoughts, flashes of inspiration, or even the sudden tasks that have been handed to you. The Japanese Memo Block has no marking, grids, or lines, it is white or in color, letting you focus on your thoughts and tasks.
Called the Colored Curve Pens, these unique dual-tipped pens by Aechy are a far cry from your typical dual-tipped pens. One end of the pen lets you lay down pretty patterns such as waves, heart roses, flowers, dashes and dots.
It basically functions as a stamp-like roller that can you use for journalling, doodling, drawing, scraping, or to make a lovely Valentine’s Day gift or card for your better half. The dual-tip markers are available in eight different colors and five-mark line types.
Japanese paper is a material that has always been loved by designers and artists for its quality. And if you want to get your hands on some of this beautiful paper, then you need to try the Japanese Drawing Pad. You can use it to create a lovely DIY gift this Valentine’s Day for your partner!
It is a premium-quality pad that lets you jot down your thoughts and passions without the stress of accidentally damaging the durable paper fibers. It creates a smooth, engaging, and relaxing writing experience.
Called the Ruler_C, this conceptual design minimizes how much contact the ruler makes with the paper or surface beneath, resulting in an unusual form that makes it quite pleasant to look at as well.
The Ruler_C’s body curves up on one side, instead of being flat, creating one long edge, while the short edges are in contact with the drawing surface. This reduces the amount of damage the ruler causes, while also elevating the tool’s usability.
Called the Gravity Pen, this all-black pen puts the center of gravity closer to your fingers, making it quite an easy pen to hold, and make agile strokes with. It allows you to have a larger grip than the barrel, giving more area for a super comfy hold.
The faceted form of that grip also makes it easier to grip the pen, allowing for a more stable grip as well. It’s the ultimate ergonomic pen design, thanks to a smart application of physics and minimalist design principles.
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They say car aesthetics evolved to keep up with our abilities to bend and shape metal. Cars in older days were boxy because we couldn’t manipulate metal sheets into 3D curves and contours. As soon as that happened, the retro-style boxy cars went the way of the dodo, giving rise to more aerodynamic, curvilinear silhouettes… but what if, in an alternate reality, the old aesthetic just stuck around? We moved onto futuristic-looking LED headlights and cyberpunk metallic gloss/matte paint-jobs… but the shell of our vehicles still retained their retro charm. Meet Hexaleaf, a concept car (and brand) from Ukrainian concept artist Andrii Snitsar. Created as a part of another project, Snitsar decided to share the Hexaleaf as an independent project on his Artstation, highlight its retro-inspired cyberpunk beauty.
Designer: Andrii Snitsar
Snitsar’s Hexaleaf somehow simultaneously looks retro as well as futuristic – think DeLorean but a lot classier. The straight lines and lack of organic curves are almost caricature-ish, but look wonderful on the car. See the cutout on the fender for the wheels and you’ll know what I mean. Snitsar is almost ridiculing the notion of car design by giving the wheels an almost SIM-card-shaped cutout (OCD-people beware). It looks eye-catching, to say the least, and brings more attention to the shiny wheel rims. The car also opts for a highly unusual front bumper, looking more like a metal bumper guard than the bumper itself. It lines up perfectly with those gorgeous headlights that feel like a luxury car from the 50s was given a facelift worthy of the year 2050.
The Hexaleaf logo features prominently on the roof – an odd choice. It can even be seen on the hood, which is where car logos are most commonly found.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly the design language that’s on display with the Hexaleaf, but there’s a strong interplay between old-fashioned and futuristic. The car’s shape, just on face value, is a hat-tip to the cars of the mid-60s, with those vertical headlights adding a distinct retro flavor (think Deville, GTO, Galaxie, or even the Eldorado). That flat-panel windshield is a throwback to an even older time when triplex glass couldn’t be bent into shape, giving the Hexaleaf an undeniable blast-from-the-past appeal. The use of chrome, for some reason, feels both retro and modern, evoking the simultaneous emotions of the DeLorean and the Cybertruck.
The rear highlights dual exhausts and a set of three-ring LED tail-lights, hidden behind a transparent facade (so the back is completely flat, coming to life only when the lights shine through. It’s surprising there’s no electric power train on this one (you’ll even see the gasoline inlet beside the taillight), but then again, the fact that it runs on fuel kinda does give it the pure American muscle vibe that I personally love.
The post This Alternate-universe Cadillac Concept is just unsettlingly beautiful first appeared on Yanko Design.
Multitools have a special place in an adventurer’s life, who must always be prepared for an emergency when venturing outdoors. The best preparation against the unforeseen is having a multitool in the everyday carry gear. Offering a number of simple and effective ways to tackle a range of problems when outside the house, or in the everyday routine at home, for that matter, a multitool in its portable format is a constructive option.
If you’re an enthusiast, or for the knowledge of the not-so-familiar, Victorinox and Leatherman are arguably the two most prominent names in the multitool industry. With the use of new materials and formats, many competitors and young designers are reinventing the wheel. A case in point is the Leica Multi, which is an EDC designed for the famed optics giant with impressions of its cameras reflected in the form factor.
Designer: Marco Barbosa
Over the years with its unrelenting simplicity and compactness, the Leica cameras have paved the way for all types of modern photography. Now the Leica M forms the basis for the design of a multitool that draws more than its looks from the SL2 camera. The Leica Multi has a similar machined aluminum body and is manually assembled for precision and quality.
The smallest of design features of the Marco Barbosa’s multitool reflect the Leica brand image and closely represent its analog camera details, which would allow the familiar customers to use the multitool easily due to the acquired knowledge from using Leica cameras. To keep it in line, and more productive for Leica users, the Multi is made to stick (through a housing) to the bottom of a Leica camera where the tripod does. To ensure the everyday carry gear is even more versatile to use its housing includes a spatial reading photometer that harks back to the analog days.
Talking of versatility, the Leica Multi is designed in two parts. The screwdriver, Philips screwdriver, saw, knife, scissors, corkscrew, and cap opener are located on one side, while the precision instruments like the flashlight and goldsmith’s keys are placed on the other. Opening these individual tools is easy: select the tool and rotate the handle.
When the particular tool is fully open, it locks into place so it is hassle-free to use, and pressing the shoot button unlocks the tool to retrieve it back to its residing space. All the tools have a magnetic tip and the flashlight on the Multi goes on and off with the press of the Leica logo onboard. The Leica Multi, bare bone is directed toward Leica customers, but its design and effectiveness, I presume, will leave many outdoorsy yearning!
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Renowned architectural firm MAD Architects recently unveiled an impressive new train station in Southeast China. The entire project revolved around rebuilding a 100-year-old train station, and completely recreating it brick-by-brick, and it now functions as a massive modern transport hub that is partially sunken underground.
Designer: MAD Architects
Dubbed the Jiaxing Train Station or the Train Station in the Forest, the original station was constructed in 1907, and then later destroyed and rebuilt in 1937. In 1995 it went through another redesign, and in 2019 it was deemed far too small for modern requirements, and MAD was commissioned to give it a total makeover. The station was a key transport link in the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, and MAD drew inspiration from this. What’s interesting is that they recreated the original train station, after inferring with experts, and taking loads of old photos and documents into consideration, they successfully created a replica. 21,000 bricks made from mud, and pulled from a nearby lake were used to build the structure, and most of it is underground.
“MAD envisioned a new station that would be both more humane and efficient than its predecessor,” explained the Chinese studio. “The overall design of the interior maintains a dialogue with the recreated 1907 station through a glass facade that clearly expresses the height difference of the two structures from the entrance.
The building’s entry, and exit platforms, major transport and commercial functions, as well as waiting halls, are now underground, which goes against the traditional design concept. The railway station now accommodates three platforms, and six lines, with two arrival and departure lines on each of the upstream and downstream main lines. By 2025, the station will be able to accommodate 5.28 million people/year, with an hourly capacity of 2500 people.
Since the structure is sunken, MAD was able to play around with the landscape, and they planted almost 1500 new trees, while rearranging the site to mimic rolling green hills. It is also connected to a park and a central lawn which will serve as an outdoor venue for concerts and art festivals. Sustainability was also incorporated into the train station, as solar panels were installed, which reduced the draw on the power grid. Generous glazing was used to maximize natural light.
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Last week, The Browser Company, a startup that makes the Arc web browser, released a slick new iPhone app called Arc Search. Instead of displaying links, its brand new “Browse for Me” feature reads the first handful of pages and summarizes them into a single, custom-built, Arc-formatted web page using large language models from OpenAI and others. If a user does click through to any of the actual pages, Arc Search blocks ads, cookies and trackers by default. Arc’s efforts to reimagine web browsing have received near-universal acclaim. But over the last few days, “Browse for Me” earned The Browser Company its first online backlash.
For decades, websites have served ads and pushed people visiting them towards paying for subscriptions. Monetizing traffic is one of the primary ways most creators on the web continue to make a living. Reducing the need for people to visit actual websites deprives those creators of compensation for their work, and disincentivizes them from publishing anything at all.
“Web creators are trying to share their knowledge and get supported while doing so”, tweeted Ben Goodger, a software engineer who helped create both Firefox and Chrome. “I get how this helps users. How does it help creators? Without them there is no web…” After all, if a web browser sucked out all information from web pages without users needing to actually visit them, why would anyone bother making websites in the first place?
The backlash has prompted the company’s co-founder and CEO Josh Miller to question the fundamental nature of how the web is monetized. Miller, who was previously a product director at the White House and worked at Facebook after it acquired his previous startup, Branch, told Goodger on X that how creators monetize web pages needs to evolve. He also told Platformer’s Casey Newton that generative AI presents an opportunity to “shake up the stagnant oligopoly that runs much of the web today” but admitted that he didn’t know how writers and creators who made the actual website that his browser scrapes from would be compensated. “It completely upends the economics of publishing on the internet,” he admitted.
Miller declined to speak to Engadget, and The Browser Company did not respond to Engadget’s questions.
Arc set itself apart from other web browsers by fundamentally rethinking how web browsers look and work ever since it was released to the general public in July last year. It did this by adding features like the ability to split multiple tabs vertically and offering a picture-in-picture mode for Google Meet video conferences. But for the last few months, Arc has been rapidly adding AI-powered features such as automatic web page summaries, ChatGPT integration and giving users the option to switch their default search engine to Perplexity, a Google rival that uses AI to provide answers to search queries by summarizing web pages in a chat-style interface and providing tiny citations to sources. The “Browse for Me” feature lands Arc smack in the middle of one of AI’s biggest ethical quandaries: who pays creators when AI products rip off and repurpose their content?
“The best thing about the internet is that somebody super passionate about something makes a website about the thing that they love,” tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer Anil Dash told Engadget. “This new feature from Arc intermediates that and diminishes that.” In a post on Threads shortly after Arc released the app, Dash criticized modern search engines and AI chatbots that sucked up the internet’s content and aimed to stop people from visiting websites, calling them “deeply destructive.”
It’s easy, Dash said, to blame the pop-ups, cookies and intrusive advertisements that power the economic engine of the modern web as the reason why browsing feels broken now. And there may be signs that users are warming to the concept of having their information presented to them summarized by large language models rather than manually clicking around multiple web pages. On Thursday, Miller tweeted that people chose “Browse for Me” over regular Google search in Arc Search on mobile for approximately 32 percent of all queries. The company is currently working on making that the default search experience and also bringing it to its desktop browser.
“It’s not intellectually honest to say that this is better for users,” said Dash. “We only focus on short term user benefit and not the idea that users want to be fully informed about the impact they’re having on the entire digital ecosystem by doing this.” Summarizing this double-edged sword succinctly a food blogger tweeted at Miller, "As a consumer, this is awesome. As a blogger, I’m a lil afraid.”
Last week, Matt Karolian, the vice president of platforms, research and development at The Boston Globe typed “top Boston news” into Arc Search and hit “Browse for Me”. Within seconds, the app had scanned local Boston news sites and presented a list of headlines containing local developments and weather updates. “News orgs are gonna lose their shit about Arc Search,” Karolian posted on Threads. “It’ll read your journalism, summarize it for the user…and then if the user does click a link, they block the ads.”
Local news publishers, Karolian told Engadget, almost entirely depend on selling ads and subscriptions to readers who visit their websites to survive. “When tech platforms come along and disintermediate that experience without any regard for the impact it could have, it is deeply disappointing.” Arc Search does include prominent links and citations to the websites it summarizes from. But Karolian said that this misses the point. “It fails to ponder the consequences of what happens when you roll out products like this.”
Arc Search isn’t the only service using AI to summarize information from web pages. Google, the world’s biggest search engine, now offers AI-generated summaries to users’ queries at the top of its search results, something that experts have previously called “a bit like dropping a bomb right at the center of the information nexus.” Arc Search, however, goes a step beyond and eliminates search results altogether. Meanwhile, Miller has continued to tweet throughout the controversy, posting vague musings about websites in an “AI-first internet” while simultaneously releasing products based on concepts he has admittedly still not sorted out.
On a recent episode of The Vergecast that Miller appeared on, he compared what Arc Search might do to the economics of the web to what Craigslist did to business models of print newspapers. “I think it’s absolutely true that Arc Search and the fact that we remove the clutter and the BS and make you faster and get you what you need in a lot less time is objectively good for the vast majority of people, and it is also true that it breaks something,” he says. “It breaks a bit of the value exchange. We are grappling with a revolution with how software works and how computers work and that’s going to mess up some things.”
Karolian from The Globe said that the behavior of tech companies applying AI to content on the web reminded him of a monologue delivered by Ian Malcolm, one of the protagonists in Jurassic Park to park creator John Hammond about applying the power of technology without considering its impact: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/who-makes-money-when-ai-reads-the-internet-for-us-200246690.html?src=rss
LEGO Technic has found a deep-rooted fancy for motorsports lately with the release of the McLaren F1 MP4 Ayrton Senna LEGO set and Speed Champions 2023 McLaren. Now the group has revealed the Mercedes-AMG W14 E Performance and a smaller pull-back version. The scaled replica of Lewis Hamilton’s 2023 Mercedes-AMG W14 F1 car is highly intricate and one to get for Formula-1 fans who follow the sport passionately.
The seven-time world champion sparked the interest of audiences worldwide with his domination at the pinnacle of motorsports for nearly a decade. This has earned the team millions of fans who come to witness the driving craft of Lewis and his machine. Sadly the team has tumbled from the top spot as Red Bull hit back with a flurry of wins but that doesn’t take anything away from the champion and his glory years. This LEGO set celebrates that winning spree and domination etched forever in the hearts of Mercedes fans.
Designer: LEGO Group
LEGO Technic is expanding its ever-growing collection of motorsports replicas with the Mercedes-AMG F1 W14 E Performance LEGO set. The 1/8 scale model can be built piece by piece from the individual 1,642 LEGO bricks to form the W14 measuring 13 cm tall, 63cm long and 26 cm wide. Symbolized by the black color to keep the carbon parts from being painted to reduce that minuscule amount of weight, the F1 car is crafted to the most fine details.
The see-through V6 engine has moving piston parts, a working steering wheel, suspensions, differential, slick tires (without the Pirelli branding) and a DRS rear wing to complete the build. The original livery in the form of stickers has been replicated on the bodywork, making it a very inviting final form if you love the Silver Arrows for what they are.
The LEGO set will be released on March 1, 2024, for interested buyers and I’m sure there will be many takers. Also, LEGO will release a smaller version for kids in a pull-back form to have maximum fun.
The post The 1,642 piece LEGO Mercedes-AMG W14 E Performance will arrive in March 2024 first appeared on Yanko Design.