You’d be hard pressed to find a franchise with a more engaged fan base than Harry Potter, and its devotees have demonstrated their dedication time and time again by gobbling up any morsel of content remotely related to Rowling’s wizarding world. They have also, on occasion, recreated bits of it themselves.
One of the most impressive examples of this phenomenon was recently posted by a Reddit user named tbornottb3, who, according to Mashable, managed to make a replica of the Weasley family’s clock — a fully functioning replica.
For the uninitiated, the film version of the clock hung in the living room at The Burrow, and featured nine hands, one for each resident of the household. Instead of keeping track of time, however, these hands pointed to one of nine locations (garden, school, home, dentist, prison, lost, quidditch, travelling, and mortal peril) and revealed where each character was at any particular time.
Though the real life version of the clock (above) doesn’t employ the sort of magic Potter fans are used to, there’s a fair bit of technological wizardry involved, as the timepiece is synced to the family’s smart phones, thereby keeping tabs on their locations, just like its silver-screen counterpart. It also employs LED lights in place of hands, and has a slightly different list of locations (holiday, on the way, forest, home, work, and mortal peril).
tbornottb3 detailed the process through a series of pictures and explanations, so if you’re interested in taking a crack at building your own, the road map is all laid out for you. That said, on a scale of “easy as pie” to “rocket science,” this is probably closer to the latter.
For now, the only way to get your hands on one of these bad boys is to build it, but for those looking for an easier way to get their Potter fix, you can catch the Rowling-penned Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in theaters starting November 18, 2016.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?