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Wil Wheaton Particle Emitter, an Augmented Reality

Cory Doctorow at 7:48 pm Sat, Apr 14, 2012

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Michael Zoellner took the iconic Recursive Wil Wheaton t-shirt photo and turned it into an Augmented Reality Wil Wheaton Particle Emitter. When the photo is viewed through an AR app, it begins to fire an animated stream of correctly positioned recursive Wil Wheatons, each one more particulate than the last.

You probably have heard of the Recursive Wil Wheaton t-shirt. Paul (of Paul and Storm) sent it to Wil and this photo became quite popular. It was remixed by an unknown genius into an animated gif and “won at the internet”.

Over the weekend i experimented with the new PointCloud Augmented Reality SDK (which is by the way brilliant and simple: 3D tracking and HTML5). I took Recursive Wil and turned the concept around: A Wil Wheaton Particle Emitter.

Scott Meyer from basicinstructions.net sent me the original SVG file of the shirt’s image. My first try was using Processing.js for animation (Yes! Processing.js now works in AR). But SVG and CSS 3D were the better choice to get a perspective effect. And it’s hardware accelerated on iOS.

Michael is the same dude who encoded the opening of my novel Makers to be displayed as a persistence-of-vision lightshow which was mounted to the collar of a small, high-energy dog, who proceeded to tear-ass around a park one night, spelling out the book in glowing letters.

A Wil Particle Emitter in Augmented Reality

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE:  ar • awesomesauce • Funny • happy mutants • video • Weird • youtube

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  • nanuq

    Does Sheldon Cooper know about this?

    WWHEAATTTOOONNN!!!

  • http://www.facebook.com/nikolaj.mariager Nikolaj Mariager

    So I just did a full sound/mute check on my computer, my browser, YouTube and my sound system. Turns out there’s no sound in the video. *sigh*

  • Doctor J. Orbital Death-Ray

     Agreed. Needs more PEW-PEW-PEW.

  • retepslluerb

    It would have helped if he had shown the hand holding the picture.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZH5LQHHJPERMWNVHCR2Y5GRHHE Jose

    Why don’t the emitted Wil Wheatons have a Wil Wheaton on their shirts?

    • joeposts

      Recursive copyrights are the trickiest to deal with, I’m guessing the creator just didn’t want to deal with a transdimensional lawsuit.

  • herartsheloves

    I came for the kooky Wil Wheaton animation, I stayed for the  Dirk Gently wallpaper.

  • http://www.kmoser.com kmoser

    This is just a variant of Hasselhoffian Recursion.

  • puppybeard

    I fully support this clever nonsense.
    Is there a CareBears version?

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/IFQZNP5DRFZKFLW6XMOCVBXTVU 64k a Day

    http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ld1drgUhh91qc8a1ao1_1280.jpg

  • robdobbs

    Shouldn’t it be shrinking into the shirt rather than expanding beyond it?