I know it was a 5v4 fastbreak but the way Yak just sliced through the middle like a hot knife through butter had me reminiscing how Jack used to call him "Twinkle Toes" during his rookie year, dude is just insanely nimble for a 7 footer and has otherworldly touch around the basket. You can tell Jak grew up playing volleyball with his Austrian national volleyball team parents. 🏐
https://news.mit.edu/2026/three-sided-y-zipper-design-0504
I recently came across this three-sided "Y-zipper" that allows 3 flexible strips to form a single rigid structure, and seems 3D-printable to some degree.
I've always felt the Kinesis Advantage and the several dactyls I've bought and sold from mechmarket (and my own self-built custom-variant thanks to Cosmos generator) were super bulky for travel. I just wish there was something that married the portability of a flat choc split 34 keeb with the grandeur of a full-travel, keywelled Kinesis Advantage (360).
Perhaps a "Y-zipper" Dactyl shell is possible in the future. I suppose the hardest problem to solve is actually getting all the keys to reliably reach the the exact same positions in 3D space every time you popped it up from flat, not to mention long-term durability. Edit: perhaps the keywell could be rigid but the shell (which ultimately supports the keywell in 3D space) could be Y-zippered from flat every use. 👁️👄👁️ gif of the "Y-zipper" being used as tent poles
Thoughts? Has anyone else had the same crazy wish/dream? 😅
edit: it's a 2D video of a 3D scene, the camera path is navigating along pre-determined user-selected waypoints through the 3D scene, I get how "4D" is a bit disingenuous, my b. Streaming/downloadable 3DGS based experiences are already very slowly becoming a thing if you're willing to google around a bit.
edit2: you can try some some 4DGS experiences on your phone here (I'm not affiliated) https://www.4dv.ai/
edit3: it might be this company's tech, not sure https://arcturus.studio/
Found it here posted two days ago on the Toronto Raptors's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reel/2188728821702587/
This is an example of 3D Gaussian Splatting, or 3DGS for short. It is an AI-enabled technique which merges multiple camera angles into a single 3D scene that can be viewed from any direction and zoom level, hence the "bullet time" effect.
In a nutshell you can think of it like a 3D version of the pointillism art technique, but instead of dots of paint it uses millions of ellipsoid-shaped 3-dimensional "gaussians" (think of bell-curve distributions but in 3D) each with a colour, direction, and transparency. This allows 3DGS to capture natural lighting that traditional photogrammetry techniques struggle with. wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_splatting
And even though the Facebook post doesn't explicitly mention it's 3DGS, one can tell by noticing the characteristic ellipsoidal 3DGS artifacts visible inside the hardwood floor and the back of the backboard.
It will be interesting to see where the NBA ultimately takes this. The potential for enhanced immersion in NBA highlights is astronomical.
The one caveat is it currently takes GPUs minutes to "train" each 3DGS splat scene, and likely hours for the combined sequence of scenes forming a long-form 4D video.
So don't expect to have real-time, live events or sports in 4D 😅. Maybe one day.
{And, because it must be said, you can lower your proverbial pitchforks, no copyrightable material is stolen to get an AI model to produce this output; it's a legit emerging photogrammetry technology that has already been used in recent movies (the holograms of Superman's parents were made using 3DGS for example) and, now it seems, sports highlights.}
My mind is melting right now.
Edit:
just found a 7 minute Gasol NBA Finals Highlights video and the first like 5 plays are all Gasol deflections/steals.
2019 Raptors were "Team Hands" before "Team Hands" was a thing.
Great to see Jakobe and Shead step up offensively. Sucks CMB got 4 fouls early but he's a quick learner.
Raps in 7.
