A video that's also a game, and bouncing balls.

19th May 2025

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Hello!

On Lateral this week: Inés Dawson, Jenny Draper and Virginia Schutte face questions about numerous ninjas, communal cycling and medieval marketplaces!

And here's some good news from YouTube, which I haven't seen the company officially mention: the automated captions on videos have been significantly improved. There's a new system doing transcription, and on US English videos with one speaker, it's as good as (perhaps better than) a live transcriber would be. It also includes capitalisation and punctuation!

Unfortunately, that doesn't really matter for most of this week's video selections in the newsletter, which can generally be enjoyed with the sound and captions off:

Thanks to Márton for pointing me to Play Uno With Your Keyboard, a video that must have required a staggering amount of planning. It's desktop-only, relying on YouTube's keyboard shortcuts to choose narrative branches, and it'll become outdated as soon as those keyboard shortcuts change -- but in the meantime, this is exactly the sort of joyful hacking-around that I enjoy.
A quadruped insectoid drone-robot called SPIDAR, hovering in mid-air while changing its configuration. Is it in any way practical? Almost certainly not. Is it intimidating? Yes. It is solving a really interesting technology problem, with the relevant scientific paper linked in the description? Absolutely. Warning: SPIDAR makes a high-pitched screaming swarm noise that'll make you want to turn your volume down.
A friend pointed me at the video for Cibo Matto's song Sugar Water, and I can't believe I'd not seen it before: it's one of the cleverest music videos I've ever seen, and I don't want to spoil the trick for you. (There's a brief behind-the-scenes here.) It makes sense that this was directed by Michel Gondry -- see also: Star Guitar, a staggering feat of compositing for 2002; and Come Into My World, with equally good compositing but unfortunately ruined here by a ghastly, amateurish upscale.

And here are the articles and other interesting things I've found this week:

I'm a sucker for an oral history of a weird project, and this is a great one: on 2005, an advert for Sony dropped a quarter of a million bouncy balls down the hills of San Francisco. Here's how they did it, and if you never saw the original, here it is. It did work far better on uncompressed analog TV, though. (Thanks xor for the suggestion!)
An excellent long read from the MIT Technology Review: inside a romance scam compound.
A local council wanted to check how good cell phone reception actually was in their area. To get that sort of data, they'd need to drive down every street in the area... so they put the sensors on a bin lorry. (North America: "garbage truck". Australia: no idea, but I assume it's called the "garbo", please don't correct me if that's wrong.)

And finally: the Volvo EX90's LIDAR sensor will fry your phone's camera.

All the best,

— Tom

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