animation on technabob...

I’m not sure how I missed this great video clip when it first hit the Inter-tubes. Maybe I was too busy playing video games. The clip involves a hamster shimmying his way through a maze of dark jagged tunnels in search of an exit (and no, Richard Gere had nothing to do with this).

All I know for sure is…

Ok, how’s this for a concept? Take two moody lovers on a park bench. Put them inside your iPhone or iPod Touch. Shake them vigorously. Watch the sparks fly.

Yep, that’s the idea behind interactive artist Eric Loyer’s new iPhone app, Ruben & Lullaby. By jostling your iPhone, you’ll make the lovers angry. Give them a little stroke, and they’ll…

With all the insanity of the recent holidays, I somehow missed this tasty advertisement that Sony Style was running for the recent shopping season.

Created by the CGI mavens over at Tronic Studio, the ad envisions larger-than-life versions of Sony gear, poured from chocolate. The animation seamlessly melds the gigantic candy electronics with the cityscape of Manhattan.

Tronic shot live…

Disney commissioned UK-based sculptors and a group called Morpheus Prototypes to build this wooden sculpture of Wall-E as a gift for Pixar/Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter.

Here’s a closer look:

I don’t know anything about woodworking or sculpting, so I’ll leave it up to you guys to think of how long it could have taken to build this and…

Nintendo is launching the DSiWare store for the latest iteration of their DS handheld next week in Japan, and in celebration, they’re offering Ugoku Memo Chou (Moving Notepad), a notepad and animation flipbook, completely free! Of course, we won’t get the DSi until next April in the U.S., but for those lucky few who could afford the import tax on the…

This amazing wall clock can display intricate animations thanks to the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision (POV). Using a small spinning “blade” covered in red, green and blue LEDs, along with sophisticated microcontroller circuit, this clock can dynamically change its look with just the push of a button.

The clock comes with a wireless remote that lets you…

Check out this wacky Space Invaders animated video that Taito recenly put together for their Game Station arcades in Japan.

The Anime-style video tells the story of a little girl and her encounter with those pesky Invaders. My favorite part has got to be the Vocoder-processed lyrics“We are Space Invaders. Here we come to be your friend. Space. There’s no…

The other day, I showed you guys what I thought was some really impressive computer generated facial animation. Then, the guys over at Image Metrics sent me a video clip of their latest CG creation, Emily, and I was bowled over.

Emily is a truly monumental achievement, recreating every nuance of human facial expression, even though what you’re actually looking…

This amazing combination of technology and graphical artistry makes for some of the most realistic and precise 3D animated facial expressions I’ve ever seen come out of a computer.

Pendulum Studios’, AlterEgo division combines facial expression software, precision motion capture, and good old-fashioned artistry to reproduce the most minute facial movements you’ve ever seen on a digital actor. Every wrinkle,…

Artist Danielle Aubert creates pixelated masterpieces using Microsoft Excel, with surprisingly dazzling results.

About the project, she says, “…the drawings are a part of a series that I executed on an irregular daily basis for 16 months. Each drawing is in a new ‘worksheet,’ which is automatically set up as a grid. The drawings were made by changing cell preferences…

This new robotics platform out of Korea lets you build a variety of unique robots from a single set of modular parts. RoboBuilder offers a complete kit of interchangeable modules which come together to form computer programmable mini-bots.

Out of the box, there are three “standard” robot designs, HUNO, DINO and DOGY. HUNO is a humanoid robot, capable of walking…

A while back, I reported on James Clar’s cool 3D cubes which could display images using a grid of about 1000 LEDs connected to a computerized controller. While Clar’s cubes are simply amazing, they can only display monochrome images. Now, a company in China has taken the same concept and created a multi-color version.

Created by Chinese display manufacturer Seekway,…

Mario meets LEGO in these fun stop-motion clips hand animated by Nintendo fan Michael Hickox.

Michael painstakingly shot thousands of individual frames to recreate the first two levels of the classic Super Mario Brothers game. The levels are surprisingly accurate reproductions of the game. You’ll want to crank up your sound to get the full impact with the original game music…

While I’m not a huge fan of many of those old full-motion-video (FMV) games, I have to keep a place in my heart for Space Ace, a surprisingly entertaining FMV laserdisc-based game created by some of the industry’s most respected animators.

While the game has been resurrected numerous times on everything from CD-ROM to DVD to PC, this is the…

This might look like a curtain of randomly assorted lighting fixtures. But it’s actually an interactive video display that can detect movements of passersby and mimic them using light.

Entitled Space Invaders 2008, the light installation uses a grid of 176 unique lighting fixtures to work its magic. When a person passes in front of a video camera connected to…