WebProNews » Mash-Ups

Portal 2 Mashes Into The Nightmare Before Christmas

Chris Richardson — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:20:42 +0000

And the results are spectacular. Provided you can shake your gaze from the awesome Portal 2 socks leading this article, the upcoming video will be a great addition to your weekend. It also serves as another reason to be against the SOPA/PIPA/ACTA trinity.

Perhaps I’m beating a dead horse, but the video I’m teasing is really great stuff, and it’s all from the mind of a creative YouTube user who goes by the name of Harry-UK. What Harry has done is mashed up the incredibly popular Portal 2 video game with the another fantastic piece of creativity, The Nightmare Before Christmas. The finished product — This Is Aperture — is the game’s would-be rendition of the song, This is Halloween, which appeared in the Tim Burton’s claymation movie. As indicated, the results are fantastic, and, judging by the amount of views the video has — over 200,000 since it was posted on January 27 — it’s been well-received (14,012 likes versus 124 dislikes).

Another example of what happens when you pair a creative end-user with the powerful tools technology and the Internet provide, but yet, in an effort to hold on to a shifting money stream, the entertainment industry, backed by some of the most powerful governments on earth, is trying to enact measures that would essentially kill this kind of creativity. Again, all it would take is someone from Disney or Valve to complain, and boom, Harry’s awesome creation is gone.

All in an effort to stamp out piracy.

Surely there are other ways to address this issue, although, according to this unfortunate report over at TorrentFreak, apparently not.

As for the video, Harry states he did all of the music and voices himself, which only enhances the final product, and again, judging by the amount of views This is Aperture the viral nature of the video is clear. It’s been seen on a number of popular video game blogs like G4TV and Joystiq.

Making a Jumbotron Out of Mobile Devices

Chris Richardson — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:24:08 +0000

Hacks, mash ups and other alterations clearly rule the world of technology. So much so, in fact, that improving upon on third party creations and finding new levels of usability is commonplace and expected. That being said, every so often, some of these “hacks” demand you take notice of the innovation and creativity involved.

Linking up a number of mobile devices to create a Jumbotron-style of “monitor” is one of these alterations.

Thanks to some brainiacs at MIT, we now know what such a creation would look like and how it would perform. The idea is simple: they linked up a number of various mobile devices — smartphones, tablets, and laptops are mentioned — to create a single display unit that looks similar to the technology used in these oversized monitors. According to the developers’ site, the Junkyard Jumbotron allows users to:

The Junkyard Jumbotron lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them. It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets — anything that runs a web browser. It also highlights a new way of connecting a large number of heterogenous devices to each other in the field, on an ad-hoc basis.

There’s also a video discussing the methods involved in creating a Junkyard Jumbotron, and the “coolness” factor of this particular hack is plain to see:

Do you have any mobile device hacks you’re working on? Have you heard of one that maybe escaped the public’s eye? Are you planning on creating your own personal Jumbotron out of soon-to-be unwanted first generation iPads? Let us know in the comments below.

H/t to Neatorama for the find.

Google, BBC Make Mash-Ups

Doug Caverly — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:47:05 +0000

The word “mash-up” has certain connotations; the product may not be too polished, or it could be downright amateurish. The British Broadcasting Corporation is not an amateur, however; the BBC is, in fact, the world’s biggest broadcasting corporation. And the BBC’s into mash-ups.

That’s interesting information, but even more interesting is the name of the BBC’s pal in this endeavor: Google. “One-third of the prototypes hosted on backstage.bbc.co.uk – where developers can post ideas and prototypes for reusing Auntie’s content in new and interesting ways – are mash-ups with Google Maps or other Google apps,” reports Silicon.com’s Gemma Simpson.

Also, lest you should get the idea that Google somehow slipped those mash-ups into place while “Auntie” (also known as the BBC) was looking the other way, Simpson adds that “Matthew Cashmore, BBC Backstage producer, said a lot of the content on the BBC website has a geographical element . . . and this sort of content fits well within a Google Maps mash-up.”

The BBC has, after all, proven that it wants to transition smoothly into the 21st century; it even arranged a deal with Google-owned YouTube. As for Google, well . . . we all know how the search engine company loves to forge partnerships and make acquisitions. In the end, it’s nice to see both gigantic corporations taking an interest in mash-ups, though what this means for the traditional creators of such things remains to be seen.