lab1

My New Media Hero

As an example of someone who made an iconic discovery which has granted us a new medium, I have chosen Karl Guthe Jansky.Not only is his discovery an example of the discovery of a new medium, but also a good example of a discovery made more or less by accident.The discovery he made was done in the field of astronomy (surprise!). Mr. Jansky, a physicist, was monitoring radiation in the atmosphere of the Earth with a radio antenna. He was employed by Bell Labs who wanted to establish a trans-atlantic radio telephone connection. Jansky's job was to examine the static and noise in order to see how this would influence the transmission of the human voice. He discovered several kinds of static which he could explain (for example static by thunderstorms), but there was one kind of noise he could not. This source of static turned out to be outside the Earth's atmosphere. It seemed to change position in a cycle of 24 hours, so at first he thought it was the sun. After looking at a number of these cycles, however, he concluded that it couldn't be the sun and that it had to be somewhere else in space. In his article, first published in 1933, he suggested two possibilities. One of these was indeed correct. He had measured radiation coming from the centre of the Milky Way.This discovery is the first in radio astronomy. After the second world war this form of astronomy became more popular and radio antennae especially designed for doing astronomy were built. I have chosen this example because important discoveries have been made with radio telescopes and nowadays they are very important in studying the furthest regions of the universe we can see. I have included a 1998 reprint of the article for those who are interested.Tribute to an old new medium: Final Fantasy IV and Nokia 1011When I was a little nerd back in the mid-nineties, I spent an awful lot of my time on Role Playing Games. My favorites were Final Fantasy IV (also known as II) and VI and especially part IV has filled up a lot of the rainy days back then. This project will be a tribute to these kind of games with their lovely pixel-filled graphics, simple gameplay and intricate storylines.I combined this type of game with the developments in the field of portable telephones. The result is an epic, traditional RPG-style battle between the Nokia 1011 (first commercial GSM) and iPhone 4S. The old nokias are well-known for their durability and the new iPhones are known for their technical advanced properties. However they don't last very long compared to the old nokias, which just seem to keep on ticking. This resulted in the choices I made regarding hit points and attack power.The code for this battle has been written in the processing language and the various images (background and sprites) have been created with help from adobe photoshop.This project has been very interesting since creating pixel art is something I am not very familiar with. Getting the phones to be recognisable was the main challenge.