Chilton Webb's Blog

This is what the future looks like without Human BS.  Introducing Brain Script (BS): A New Paradigm in Programming Programming languages have evolved significantly over the years, each aiming to improve on aspects such as readability, efficiency, and ease of use. HA HA That's funny. No they are not. Readability went out the window a long time ago. New languages these days are more of an excuse for some blowhard or company of blowhards to slap their name on something that we already had a way to do.  So Today, I introduce a novel concept in the programming world: Brain Script (BS), a language designed to simplify the programming experience, while enhancing the power and expressiveness available to developers. It's so easy, you probably already use it.  What is Brain Script (BS)? Brain Script is a fictional programming language that exists purely in your imagination. And on paper. And on your computer. I mean, you can put it anywhere really. BS is designed to be intuiti...

Diadorius Bryant is someone you probably don't know. He and his girlfriend, Matilda Scaduto, were avid readers, poets, and song writers in the previous century. Exactly 21 years after H. P. Lovecraft's death, the two wrote a song commemorating the "child" of Lovecraft, all grown up. Their "song" began as an incantation. If enough people chanted it, they hoped, it would awake the Old One, Cthulhu . Among other things in the song... Sudden Awakening Phenomenon: There's a phenomenon where people wake up suddenly at around 3 am or 4 am for no apparent reason. This is also known as the "witching hour", when the veil between dimensions is thinnest, which could allow a powerful chant to break through. They just needed people to sing the song at 4am. Some kind of reminder, maybe even hidden in the song. The song explains how the Old One has fallen asleep, and is entombed in a prison at the bottom of the ocean. "Trouble, Deep". And the minds o...

(This will make more sense in a minute)   Back in 2005 I was looking for a job and I saw one at a startup in Austin that was working on a tech to improve images from cell phones. Well that should be an easy one. I happen to know a thing or two about THAT, I said, patting myself on  the back super duper hard. They were looking for an "image specialist" to work under some big shot guy who had written some papers on it. I do not remember the details, also I don't care. But this was a fascination of mine already, and I'd built this little engine called iStill that would pull images from a webcam and improve them based on how other images from that same web cam had been improved.  I had the machine try to improve images, and then I'd pick the ones that were the best, and it would store that info for later. That's a high level view of how it worked.  Today we'd call that human-guided machine learning but at the time I called it whatever the hell I'd cobbled ...

Nikola Tesla only ate spaghetti with his hands "Everything you need to know about the universe can be summed up as 3, 6, 9, damn you fine." -Nikola Tesla Every few months someone sends me a thing about Tesla and 3,6,9. And every time I tell them it isn't real, he never said that. Lil John   Big Sam had something poignant to say about it, not Tesla. And there are a slew of similar quotes that make it sound like Tesla was, well, someone he was not. Tesla's brilliance did not come from some hidden, secret, forbidden knowledge. It was a combination of rigorous theory and a TON of experimentation and testing.  But lately, I've noticed the sources that originally debunked the Tesla quote are starting to disappear. That makes sense. People copy and paste the fake info, while the trusted sources are often just one website. If that site goes down, the trusted source isn't around anymore. If one fake post disappears, it's replaced a few seconds later by ten more.  ...

The VR Portrait and VR Window, and that obvious use we completely missed.  Way back in 2000, Darrel Grien came to me with an idea. He wanted a virtual 'window' into places he'd been before. The idea was he'd set up a camera when he went on a trip, capture about an hour of video, and then play this video back on a screen on his wall. Pretty straightforward, and I started putting that together for him. We even got a patent on it.  It was Glorious https://patents.justia.com/patent/20010033344 But before we were at the patent stage, we'd gone off on a few tangents. What if it was portable? What if it was wireless? What if it could mirror your computer screen? What if you could take it with you to the bathroom so you could watch an important game play even if you had to tinkle? How could we make it feel more realistic, like a real window? What if you had these in a cubicle all around you? Well, we needed to build a prototype first. Parts for it were crazy expensive. Even...

Here's how it all went down.  In August of 1999, Starship Troopers: Roughneck Chronicles made its debut, and my world was rocked. It had, at the time, some of the best CG work on the planet. It mixed characters from one of my favorite movies (Starship Troopers) with stories from one of my favorite books (Starship Troopers) and added its own flair to it on top. It was amazing. As I learned more about it, it became evident they were really breaking new ground. Foundation Imaging was one of the companies behind it, with Ron Thornton at the helm. They used LightWave3D for most of the show. Check out this madness:  Many years later, I had the opportunity to work on LightWave at NewTek, and through them, I finally met Ron. Another decade later, I finally had a chance to talk to him in depth about one of my favorite shows.  One of the biggest problems, I was surprised to learn, was motion capture cleanup. The show leveraged tons of motion capture performances, but all of that r...