Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Missiles and Rockets

Missiles and Rockets was a magazine that ran from the mid 1950's to the mid 1960's at the height of the Space Race. All the issues are available on the internet archive. It's neat to see some of the old concepts (like the manned rocket bomber above), and the advertisements in the early issues by companies trying to hire engineers and scientists so they can cash in on the flood of funding in the early gold rush days are pretty entertaining.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Octet Truss Cube: Printability Update

This little octet truss example cube moved from "First to Try" to "Successfully Printed" on my Shapeways store. They estimate a greater than 80% success rate on the print (thanks to whoever ordered the part!).
I knew it could be printed since I had previously printed versions of this design, but Shapeways updated their print-ability guidelines since then. Nice to see it still works!

Thursday, March 26, 2020

NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis


This is really cool. The capture for the specular reflections is great. I'm excited that something like this could be really useful for better photogrammetry. For instance, see this old GBU I did a long time ago. The reflections off the shiny metal cause artifacts in the point cloud reconstruction.

There's a paper, a project summary page with more views, and a github project page for the code as well.