New Floating Video Player Feature Will be coming in Your Facebook Page

In line with Facebook’s effort to have a better video sharing service, apparently the social network is currently testing on floating video player functionality.  Therefore, when you saw an interesting video on your Facebook’s News Feed page, you can watch it while scrolling through your News Feed page.

This is made possible by introducing a new video detach button and when you click on the button, the video will detach itself and move around while you scrolls up or down your Facebook’s News Feed page. The video will not stop playing as long as you stay at the same screen. Apparently this feature is not available for everyone yet. If you are lucky enough, you will see the button alongside with the playback controls. On top of that, it is only available when you are accessing Facebook on the desktop version as this feature is not available on mobile Facebook or apps for smartphones and tablets yet.

The floating video player will have basic and minimal playback interface such as the usual play/pause and close buttons, however, there also will be a Like and Share buttons as well.  In the future, hopefully, the floating video player can be moved outside the browser so that it can be played even though the user is accessing other website.  Another improvement that can be made is for the size of the floating video player to be a little bit bigger or allow users to resize it on their own.

This new functionality is seen as Facebook’s way to sell marketing space for advertisers.

New Floating Video Player Feature Will be coming in Your Facebook Page

Disney"s New Movie Is Made Using A 55,000-Core Supercomputer

Something big was brewing at Disney. A new movie and this time they took it to a new level. Big Hero 6 takes place in the futuristic city of San Fransokyo, it is about a kid and his soft robot. The story comes from the Marvel universe and has been reimagined for the Disney crowd.

The movie is made on a new software called Hyperion which was used to handle the movie’s lighting requirements; one of about three dozen tools used to make this movie. The software was still in beta while the movie was being developed.

 

It took 10 people 2 years to build Hyperion and a lot of money was being spent on its production. They even had a backup plan in case things didn’t go as planned, but later decided to cancel the backup plan and go ahead with the ambitious feat.

Hyperion is a global-illumination simulator. It makes incredibly complex calculations to decide how light bounces off of objects. Indirect lighting can now be achieved for 10 to 20 bounces by the software. This enhances environmental effects to a great extent. The movie could not have been made without this software. The vinyl robot in this film is illuminated from behind. This lighting trick was done through Hyperion, running on a 55,000-core supercomputer which was spread across four different geographic locations.

The scale and speed of computations used to make this movie possible are quite amazing. This movie was rendered using four rendering farms; connected to each other using a software called Coda. This made them act as a single supercomputer.

“This movie’s so complex that humans couldn’t actually handle the complexity. We have to come up with automated systems,” says Hendrickson.

This project was so huge compared to the past movies that Hendrickson said:

“(Hyperion) could render Tangled from scratch every 10 days.”

The fictional city of San Fransokyo contains 83,000 buildings, 260,000 trees, 215,000 streetlights and 100,000 vehicles. Street layouts from the actual city of San Francisco were used to make this city.

Big Hero 6 is a fantasy film about the future, makers and robots; a film by and from tech lovers. If you’ve watched the film, then please tell us if you liked it in the comments section below.

Disney"s New Movie Is Made Using A 55,000-Core Supercomputer

Is Hendo The Hoverboard From Back To The Future II ?

How can we forget Back to the Future Part II when talking about hoverboards? Yes, a California startup built a hoverboard, a real file hoverboard!

Arx Pax is trying to crowdfund Hendo, a hoverboard built as proof of concept of the hover engine technology. While, its not the kind of hoverboard that you can take outside and ride wherever you want, but its a big leap forward. The hendo hoverboard is no toy though, it can easily support up to 300 pounds and uses the same technology used in MagLev trains. This means that it requires a surface made of non-ferrous metals (copper or aluminum) to levitate. You can turn the hoverboard by putting more weight on one side.

 

.

The Hendo hoverboard came about as a result of a different idea. This technology was initially meant to be used to save buildings from earthquakes by lifting them above their foundations. Henderson himself said that:

“If you can levitate a train that weighs 50,000 kilograms, why not a house?”

This would keep the house would safe from an impending earthquake as long as it is levitating. This idea might be as fictional as a hoverboard, but the team intends to reach this long-term goal some day. For now, they’re making hoverboards.

The Hendo “white box” is currently on Kickstarter. Those who pay at least $299 will get a package containing the hover engine and hover surface to play with. They hope this will encourage people to use hover technology in new ways.

“The most important piece of it all for me is the idea of taking away the limitations of how we think about problems in general. Not just thinking outside the box, but off the page,”

We can adapt solutions to problems by using hover technology.

“When you do that — when you approach problems that were seemingly impossible in different ways — you’ll never cease to be amazed by the solutions you can come up with.” Henderson said.

They set up some really nice incentives for backers on Kickstarter. 250 backers at the $100 level will get a five-minute ride on one of the hendo prototypes, and backing $1,000 will get you a one hour ride, private coaching included. The first 10 backers to give $10,000 get their very own hoverboard which will get delivered to them on 10/21/2015 (when Marty McFly arrives in the future).

Is Hendo The Hoverboard From Back To The Future II ?