Ridiculously impressive and tiny landscape generation

The demoscene is a subculture of computer art that specialises in creating non-interactive audiovisual content to certain set limits. This bit of art, called ‘Elevated’, is an example of the ‘intros’ subcategory, which limits programmers to either 64kb or 4kb file sizes. The above example is 4k.

Watch that video again, and consider that everything – music, landscape and lighting – fits into 4,000 bytes – the equivalent of 800 average english words. That’s *nothing*. That’s less than nothing!

But it’d be difficult for this tech to be integrated into games because it’s so compressed – although file sizes would get smaller, load times would increase massively. In tech, processor speeds are considerably more limited than storage, so for the moment expect this to stay a tiny subculture.

If you want to check it out for yourself, then you can download the file from Pouet, but you’ll need a pretty impressive graphics card to do it justice – it probably won’t work too well on your office PC. Expect to see a black screen for a few mins while it loads, too.

Elevated (via RPS)

eBay Nutcase of the Week: Aerocar N103D "flying car" up for spares or repair

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This innocent-looking little bubble car is, so the auction says, the first and only officially certified and legally usable flying car in the world.

The wings don’t fold out – they come in a separate trailer and need attaching, a process which apparently takes “five minutes”. Once you’re up, you can can soar above (and trying not to think about crashing into) the traffic below at a thrilling airspeed of 100mph…

Vertipod – the flying Segway (OF DEATH)

vertipod.jpgFancy dying in a unique and novel way that will secure your immortality via a report on the local news?

Perhaps you ought to investigate the Vertipod. Clearly little more than a death trap for the rich and tired of life, Vertipod is a hovering, $10,000 potential death machine, which maker Pete Bitar would probably prefer we called a “personal transport solution.”

Forget the tights and cockpiece, the PAL-V flying car will really turn you into Batman

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Figures that the concept for a flying car would come from the Netherlands, a country famous for their lax drugs laws and the only place you can wander into a coffee shop on the street and come out with a hash-soaked strawberry milkshake. Ahh, memories…

A Dutch inventor, John Bakker, has created a flying gyrocopter tricycle, or ‘Personnel Air Vehicle’ (PAL-V), which has been in development the past six years and even received funding from private investors.

According to Born Rich, the…