Put the headset away. Everybody has got to stop confusing AR and VR. This article is about AR (Augmented Reality), not about people stumbling into things while locked away inside a virtual world via their sci-fi goggles.
Does the above picture make you want to yodel? If so, you are probably Swiss, Austrian or Southern German. Now we’re not saying it’s silly season for course news or anything, but this one did catch our attention. So here it is: there is a course in yodelling.
Evening classes, you might be thinking. Or a video-based online course a few weeks long? After all, how long does it take to learn how to wobble your voice up and down?
Does the above picture make you want to yodel? If so, you are probably Swiss, Austrian or Southern German. Now we’re not saying it’s silly season for course news or anything, but this one did catch our attention. So here it is: there is a course in yodelling.
Evening classes, you might be thinking. Or a video-based online course a few weeks long? After all, how long does it take to learn how to wobble your voice up and down?
The 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea opened with a high-tech display involving 1,218 drones flying in tight formation, making various shapes including the Olympic rings, a snowboarder, and other fabulous coloured shapes in the sky. It totally wowed the crowd at the event and viewers around the world, and was a tour de force of what this article is about: entertainment engineering.
Have you seen Ready Player One? In a not-too-distant future, the film depicts humanity spending most of its time in a virtual world called the Oasis. Built by fictional software genius James Halliday, the Oasis becomes a refuge for the world’s population in the face of grim living conditions in the real world due to a breakdown in geopolitics and overpopulation. In this VR world, you can be anyone or anything you want, go anywhere you like, and live out your fantasies. It’s like Second Life on steroids.
Modern smartphones have a host of software tricks to make photos look better, plus cameras in some models that are as good as dedicated digital cameras. Almost everybody has a good quality camera in their pocket at all times now. But, as the saying goes, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The technology takes care of a lot of things, like exposure, colour and effects processing, but it does not (yet) point the camera in the right place and compose a scene for you.
Synthesizers have come a long way since the Moog and the Fairlight in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s no longer new to hear samples of raindrops falling into water in music tracks, as it was when Jean-Michel Jarre gave us his groundbreaking soundscapes on the pioneering albums Oxygène and Équinoxe. Synth sounds are so commonplace now that to create new sounds, you need to know a few things about how they work, and learn a bunch of software, to see how you can push the envelope.
Maybe there’s a slight pang of guilt at the clickbaity title, but it got your attention and there are excellent reasons to read on. We’re talking about the links between exercise and feeling good in yourself, otherwise known as mental health. Here’s a course that delves into the exact mechanisms that link exercising to that inner glow.
The Basque country between France and Spain has a proud culinary tradition that has led to the creation in 2011 of the Basque Culinary Center, a university dedicated entirely to food. The Faculty of Gastronomic Sciences at Mondragon University joined with a group of prominent chefs to found the first official university-level training courses in Spain (the Degree in Gastronomy and Culinary Arts), combined with a Research and Innovation Center in the field of food and gastronomy.
There’s a course on Udemy that might be worth looking into if you’re tired of the 9 to 5 routine and want to see more of the world. It describes how to get paid to travel. They don’t give away the exact details of their method because that would be stupid – they are selling an ‘information product’ in the style of get rich quick schemes, and the only way to get at their secret sauce is to pay for it.
TV game shows love progress bars, don’t they? The contestants and audience hold their breath as blocks light up to create a path towards a prize, or a big thermometer-like thing rises until a desired goal is reached. We seem to be hard-wired to respond to these visualisations of progress, and get a sense of achievement and reward when the goal is reached.
