Ever wondered what Da Vinci's Mona Lisa would look like in 3D?  

Well ... thanks to Samsung, who have created this fantastic advert for their new 3D TV ... your wait is finally over! 

The video also reveals some surprising "truths" about familiar old masters such as Seurats' Bathers at Asnieres, A Bar at the Follies-Bergère Édouard Manet and the Vitruvian Man (or men).

Enjoy. 

 

On April 1^st, Spectrecom turned 5 years old. Trading began in a small business unit at Faircharm Studios in Deptford with very limited funds, no staff and no customer base whatsoever.

Three friends from my university days, Sarah Aynesworth, Steve Milton and Steve Ryan, helped me form the company. From the outset our idea was to combine a corporate video production company with a studio operation. It was an unusual business model but it stood us in good stead. In that shaky first year, whilst we were slowly building up our corporate video client base, when we could barely afford the coffee bills, the studio accounted for over 50% of our business and kept us going.

Steve Ryan left Spectrecom in 2007 to focus on his own special interests in Bristol, but Sarah, Steve Milton and I remain. Over champagne to celebrate our anniversary, we rather un-modestly agreed a few achievements that I thought worth recording here.

We felt that by and large, we'd succeeded in our intention to put corporate responsibility at the heart of our business, leading to very positive and tangible environmental benefits and training outcomes. For example, we were thrilled when one of our trainees, Georgina Studd, won at the First Light Movie Awards last year.

Something else worthy of note, we've retained our core staff from the early days, and we're delighted that Ben, Christiaan, Pearl and Jonny are still with us.

We made a success of the video / studio model too, resulting in our recent expansion to new studio premises in central London here at Waterloo.

Of course, a business is nothing without it's customers. Over the years we've built up a fantastic client base, won some major awards (including IVCA Gold) and become the UK's undisputed leading producer of University Recruitment Videos. So to all of those clients who have helped Spectrecom become what it is today – a big thank you!

Naturally we recorded quite a few more achievements, but by the time we'd got onto celebrating the upgrade to a much larger stationery cupboard here at Waterloo (it really is spacious), it was felt we were scraping the barrel somewhat. So finally, we toasted Byron Barrett who took over the Faircharm Studio operation from us (now Live Vision Studios). Byron is starting out exactly as we did 5 years ago, combining studio operations with corporate video production, and we wish him the very best of luck.

 

Where it all started! Andrew's and Sarah's desks at the Faircharm Studio on 1 April 2005.

So ... Apple's new iPad - initially met with a mixture of enthusiasm, bewilderment, dissapointment and derision - has already sold more than 300,000 on it's launch day in the US. The figure include pre-orders of the device, as well as sales at Apple stores across the country; and is just short of the number of iPhones sold on it's first day.

Here's a great little video from Brian Stark which employs stop motion animation, cut to "Up the Spout" by Mateo Messina. Enjoy.

Ever wondered what animals are actually saying to each other? Well ... you're in luck! "I've got an app for that"  

Google has just released a brand new App - Translate for Animals - which promises to "bridge the gap between animals and humans".

Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, Google worked closely with many of the world's top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Watch the video above to find out all about the revolutionary App and take a tour about the product here.

An unnamed source at Google stated that "we've always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human".

If you haven't guessed already, this is of course an April's Fools prank from the guys at Google. And a pretty decent one too.

Here's a great short film called "Nature by Numbers" by Cristóbal Vila that I came across on Vimeo, but is currently trending across a variety of video-sharing sites

Inspired by "numbers, geometry and nature", I wasn't convinced by the film at first, but the beautiful motion graphics, accompanied by a perfect choice of music, soon drew me in until I was mesmerised.

Artists and architects have used geometrical and mathematical properties since ancient times, but these properties and sequences are also found in nature too - a phenomenon communicated brilliantly in Vila's short film.

For more information surrouding the theories - The Fibonacci Series & Spiral, The Golden & Angle Ratios, The Delaney Triangulation and Voronoi Tessselations - go to www.etereastudios.com. There are lots of free training materials and 3D workshops, too.