Hasta La Gadget!

We usually hear of fictional worlds brought to life in Minecraft, but there’s more than one way to skin a globe. A group called the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project or MED-EM has been using a program called Outerra for the past 5 years to make a realistic model of the world of The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy books. Redditor and MED-EM member cameni shared some images of their virtual planet online.

Outerra is a 3D graphics engine specialized for creating planets and terrain. It’s been in development since 2008 and is still in alpha, but it seems to have attracted a following already. One of its defining features is that it lets users create a world with “unlimited visibility”, where you can start viewing the planet as a whole and then zoom in and see details of entire hundreds of kilometers of lands, landforms and so on, up to tiny blades of grass. In other words, you can explore every inch of virtual Middle-earth. There’s not much to see, but that’s what imagination is for eh?

If you’re a Middle-earth tourist like me, check out these two annotated images by Redditor coomb. Here are some of the important locations in Middle-earth:

And here’s Frodo’s journey, as told in The Fellowship of the Ring.

That’s one long journey. Even if it wasn’t dangerous I can see why Gwaihir and his homies didn’t join the trek.

Before Tolkien fans get upset, MED-EM knows that their model isn’t perfect. For instance, Redditors and MED-EM members Redrobes and monkschain pointed out that Mordor is a desert and even has a little snow, but that error stems from limitations on Outerra’s biome options.

Monkschain also said that they used several real world locations as inspiration for some of the areas they made: “Parts of NZ were used for the White Mts. The Alps for Misty Mts. Carpathians for Mordor. Chalk Downs of England for parts of the Shire, Africa for Far Harad. Finland and Norway, etc for the far north.” 

There’s a banana for scale in there somewhere.

MED-EM is only focused on building the planet, not populating it.

Hence you’ll find no structures, elves, hobbits or monsters.

Here’s a video of the world that monkschain made last year:

Grab your browser and your axe and download the Outerra demo and MED-EM’s dataset.

[via Reddit]

We’ve seen people use the Oculus Rift to simulate beheadings. BeAnotherLab used the virtual reality headset for something less morbid but no less interesting. The organization’s The Machine to be Another was an “artistic investigation” in which the Rift was used to give participants first person views from actual people.

In one experiment, participants were told to direct the movements of a performer – if they moved their hand, the performer would move their hand as well, if they walked, the performer walked etc. The participant wore an Oculus Rift, through which he or she saw real time footage from a camera mounted on the performer.

The participant could also make the performer pick up objects scattered throughout the experiment area, at which point the performer would say something about the object they picked up. It was like a first-person video game, except you’re controlling an actual person and exploring the real world.

In another experiment, two participants – one male and one female – became each other’s performer. The pair had to synchronize their movements, which is why you can see them being slow and tentative in the video below. The idea was to put the participant in the body of the opposite sex. Note that the video below contains nudity:

Amazing isn’t it? Perhaps studies and experiences like this will be a lot easier to pull off when computer graphics become more life-like. Imagine you’re a browser and head to The Machine to be Another website for more information.

[via The Verge]

We already saw a very cheap way to emulate the NVIDIA Shield’s game streaming function using a smartphone and VNC. But if you want an even cheaper way – assuming you don’t already have a smartphone – check out Limelight Pi, an open source program that lets you stream Steam games to a Raspberry Pi.

Made by GitHub member irtimmer, Limelight Pi uses NVIDIA’s GameStream technology to stream your Steam games. Thus, you’ll still need an NVIDIA GTX 600/700 series GPU, NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience program and either a high-end wireless router or an Ethernet connection. Here’s a demo by YouTuber leCauchemarXY. The screen on the left is the one connected to the Raspberry Pi.

You can download Limelight Pi from irtimmer’s Github page. Limelight Pi is actually a fork of irtimmer’s Limelight, which works on Windows, OS X and Linux computers. So if you’d rather stream to a desktop computer, get Limelight instead of Limelight Pi.

[via Raspberry PiPod]

I like a good prank, especially when its played on unsuspecting people on the streets. something about strangers getting the crap scared out of them in public makes me smile. A new movie is coming out soon called Devil’s Due, and to promote the film Thinkmodo created a horrific baby to prank passersby.

The creepy animatronic baby was put inside a stroller. Both stroller and baby are remote controlled and the little devil can pop up and shoot milk out of its mouth Linda Blair style. You have to watch the video yourself, so I won’t give any more away:

Needless to say, people scare easily. That is until the devil baby rolls up on the trash man, he doesn’t even blink. Clearly, he is someone that has seen it all.

[via Nerd Approved]

Christmas may be over, but there’s always next year. And if it is treats under the tree and tweets on the tree that you want, you can prepare for next December right now. Instructables member Gelotology will show you how to make this Tweetball. That’s right. It’s an ornament that displays a stream of tweets from a certain username, hashtag or keyword.

It is especially handy if you are waiting for a tweet from Santa. Gelotology made it with an Arduino controller and two PHP scripts. If you want to make one for yourself, you can find step-by-step instructions at the link above. You’ve got plenty of time to get it done, so you have no excuse.

Santa will be very impressed with you next Christmas.

[via Hack A Day via Neatorama]