Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending Bar Camp Tokyo with 94 of my geek and aspiring geek brethren. Perhaps I’ll go into this more in a further blog post, but suffice to say it was a great experience with people who were open to all sorts of conversation about the present and future of our digital world.
With Nob Seki of Six Apart via dshack
One of the more interesting presentations was made by Fumi Yamazaki. Fumi talked about Japanese geek culture, something we’re clearly fond of around here, and introduced some of the more creative examples to the attendees. You can see her presentation here.
Fumi’s presentation also had something that completely slipped by my radar, despite my being a regular at NicoNico Douga, Japan’s top streaming video site. We wrote about NicoNico here a bit, and Serkan Toto of Techcrunch does a nice job summing it up here.
The video below is an example from Fumi’s speech and puts together three of the most interesting user generated animations I’ve ever seen. Not being so great at Excel myself it’s hard for me to understand how it’s done, but all three clips are created purely within Excel spreadsheets and then animated frame by frame(you can see the counter in the corner going like crazy). The attention to detail is absolutely amazing, and I’m simply in awe. This is exactly the kind of creativity that makes me love Japan.
Just for comparison, the original opener for Maria Holic (the first clip) is HERE. There are 3 clips in the video below, and the third one is especially amazing.
UPDATE: Somehow Media Factory submitted a copyright claim on these videos, which they clearly had no part in making to begin with. Thanks, Media Factory, for stopping the free spread of other people’s creative activity online.
Originals can be found here, here, and here
Interestingly, I uploaded this video two years ago simultaneously on YouTube and NicoNico. The first went on to get over 4.5 million views (and counting!), while the NicoNico video has lingered at 1,500. Clearly it’s a different kind of community.
While at BarCamp I also got to have a nice chat with Mitch Altman (inventor of TV-B-Gone, made famous by Gizmodo) and played around with his soon-to-be-released Trip Glasses. Hard to explain, but here’s a video of me at Bar Camp reliving my college days through LED lights timed to my brainwaves. You can meet him as well this weekend at the Make Tokyo Meeting.
Via dshack
Check out some more pics from Barcamp Tokyo at Flickr with iMorpheus and jimgris
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