On the Topic of TED

A few more excellent TED talks that I’ve recently stumbled on:

Malcolm Gladwell on what we can learn from spaghetti sauce: As per usual, Gladwell challenges the idea of “common sense” and gets you thinking in ways that you normally don’t.

Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice: Does freedom of choice really make us happier as a people?

Bill Gates on what we can do right now to change the world: As a lifelong believer of giving people the tools to solve problems well within their reach, Gates poses simple solutions to seemingly complex problems. His argument is that some problems don’t get solved simply because the market is not motivated to tackle them. What can we do to change that?

If you have a few minutes to be challenged, do drop by the TED website and listen to some smart people.

The Curious Case of Emotion Capture Technology

After being linked to the website by a colleague today, I spent a few hours rediscovering my love for TED Talks. For those who have never been, the website is like youtube, but without all the garbage. It is simply a massive collection of lectures by really smart people on just about every topic under the sun.
This evening, I stumbled upon a particularly amazing talk by Ed Ulbrich, the visual effects executive producer on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He and His team at Digital Domain spent four years creating the digital head that plays the part of Benjamin Button for the first half of the film. Most importantly, they didn’t animate any of it.

The team developed a technology called Emotion Capture that allowed them to analyze video of Brad Pitts’ facial performance of a scene and map that directly onto their computer models of his face. For anybody interested in computer graphics, this is an incredible lecture, and a must see.

More information regarding Digital Domain and the technology that they developed for this project can be found here and here.