Graphene from explosions, terrifying robot bats, how to get started in VR, and more
Graphene from explosions, terrifying robot bats, how to get started in VR, and more in this weeks Some Things I Read Last Week Jan 30 — Feb 6.
In case you missed last week:
Science & Technology
Graphene promises to be a wonder material from the future, but it’s been too expensive and hard to manufacturer to get of labs and into consumer products. This new technique may change all of that.
The future of transportation may be shooting people down tubes. Last week, SpaceX held their first competition which tested several capsule designs by shooting them down a 1.25 kilometer test tube.
Watching this thing fly is both terrifying and mesmerizing.
When a natural gas facility went out of commission, Tesla went to task bringing one of the world’s largest electron-storing solutions to life in less than six months.
More terrifying robots from Boston Dynamics.
Design
Airbnb just made this incredible tool to take animations from After Effects and turn them into native animations.
Here are 11 extremely helpful tips for building mobile forms.
Virtual Reality
If you’re looking to get started in making VR experiences, this is a very comprehensive starter guide, and it also has plenty of great resources for those who are already building for VR.
Sometimes the best prototyping tool is just pencil and paper. This article shows you how to draw out a prototype and bring it into VR.
Software & Programming
This series of articles explores how Folds from functional programming can be used to solve problems like differential equations or even building a Kalman filter. Ultimately this leads to more simplified code that’s easier to test.
ASCII is one of those things that every developer has had to work with countless times, but this trick gave me a whole different understanding.
This article is a good introduction on probabilistic programming, and how it can be used to easily solve extremely complex problems.