James Brown

James Brown

@ancient.bsky.social

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ancientjames email: inquiries@ancient-workshop.com

1.2K followers201 following338 posts

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

This is a really neat autostereoscopic display

petarpjanic.bsky.social@petarpjanic.bsky.social

Excited to share our new prototype: HoloPOT 360° V2.0, a low-cost display that shows 3D without glasses. www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Q-... To be clear: this is not a product, it's a passion research project. #3Ddisplay #Innovation #Engineering #Research #lightfield

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

It’s traditional, when printing a replacement part for a household item, to show it off on social media. So here’s my hinge for a clothes horse.

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

My favourite optimisation trick is to just hit 'break' in the debugger. It's more likely to stop where the program's spending more of its time. It seems like you should have to do it multiple times and gather stats or something, but so often it just goes straight to the heart of the matter.

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

This pops up every time Resolve updates. If I must install them, why are you giving me the option not to? And why is one of them unselected by default? And why does it seem to work just fine anyway?

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

I've been using this shamefully janky rig in basically every video since the first volumetric display. It pivots the camera around a single axis, and is a very cheap and simple way to get fluid orbiting shots. It never caused any comments before, but it's really doing so in the latest video.

View full thread
James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

The demo sequence involved a set of motions that was very carefully chosen. Vertical, horizontal, vertical and horizontal simultaneously, short and fast, very wide - anything that's not explicitly shown tends to be seen as a limitation of the device rather than of the camera work. But I missed one!

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

I didn't change the length of the swing arm, so they were all at the same distance. And sure enough someone popped up confidently explaining that that's because the effect only works in a narrow distance range. No! It's because that's how hinges work!

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

I've been using this shamefully janky rig in basically every video since the first volumetric display. It pivots the camera around a single axis, and is a very cheap and simple way to get fluid orbiting shots. It never caused any comments before, but it's really doing so in the latest video.

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

I'm not really sure why. Watching the footage I see all the wobbles and speed variation, but to a lot of people it's fakery. I did go with a paper thin depth of field which gives it all a bit of a dreamy look (otherwise the pixel grid of the LEDs was too dominant and made it look 2D)

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

(The holdup was that the repo originally contained the voxel models which weren't mine to distribute, and this is how long it takes me to delete one directory and add one line of instructions to a readme.)

James Brown reposted

Tim Aidley
@tim.aidley.com

In 1999/2000 I wrote a WWI aerial combat game along with a couple of colleagues, and called 'Hunt for the Red Baron'. I've always had a soft spot for it, and I've finally got a port of it that runs in the browser; have a look here: tim.aidley.com/projects/hun... Best played with mouse and keyboard

tim.aidley.comHunt for the Red Baron - Resurrected!Over a period of around 9 months in 1999/2000, I wrote a WWI aerial combat game. You can now play it live in a browser!
James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

So much of the edit was spent grappling with crappy footage and trying to decide whether I should reshoot everything or simply disappear into the woods never to be seen again, so it's gratifying to see youtube comments saying the perfect camera work proves it's all fake.

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

Genuine thank you to anyone who has subscribed though. I never set out to have a youtube channel - it was just somewhere to archive my stuff. The more people turned up, the more I felt obliged to put some effort in to it.

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

I always complain about how hard it is to do justice to my 3D displays in 2D video, but this one really takes it to new levels. I think I've managed something here which gives a sense of what you see irl. The trick is to film it in potato vision - in high res 2D you only see the pixel grids.

James Brown reposted

Richard Easther
@rjme.bsky.social

I make this plot each year for our "intro to rocket science" course. It's remarkable that as many rockets go to orbit from New Zealand as from Russia – but on a per head basis we stand alone. This is an amazing place for a small country to find itself, and we should be making the most of it...

James Brown
@ancient.bsky.social

I've nearly finished the build video for this thing. According to Wikipedia, "The term 4K is generic and refers to any resolution with a horizontal pixel count of approximately 4,000" which means this is literally a 4K mechanical TV. (It's also literally 20p, but that's not how marketing works).

James Brown reposted

Alasdair Allan
@alasdairallan.com

In 1988 a company that made record turntables built its own CPU, because it hated its factory software. It failed. Every one of those ideas ships today. Hardware memory safety. Garbage collection in silicon. Persistent objects. Chips shaped to a workload. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/t...

negroniventurestudios.comThe computer at the bottom of a canalSomewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a proce...