I created this nightmare image of a skeletal being with glowing eyes in a post-apocalyptic landscape using Stable Diffusion and A1111 earlier this year. It required very little prompting to come up with this frightening picture.
Category: Computers
-
Williams’ Moon Patrol Gameplay Transformed With Stable Diffusion
For the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing some of the images that I have created using Stable Diffusion, an opensource generative AI text-to-image model created by Stability.AI. Today begins the series with images based on a classic video game.
Earlier this year, I used the low-resolution screenshot of Williams’ 1982 Moon Patrol video game from its Wikipedia page and manipulated it with Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111’s stable-diffusion-webui tool. After many, many iterations with img2img and some inpainting, I arrived at the image above. The most difficult part of the image was creating the moon buggy with six wheels, something that most SD 1.5 derived models seem to abhor.
Later, I took another stab at transforming the gameplay screenshot to a high resolution version. This time, I used controlnet to create the moon buggy based on the Alvis Stalwart. With inpainting, I was able to achieve great detail and lighting on the buildings.
Wouldn’t it be cool to see a new Moon Patrol game with high resolution graphics and ray tracing? Layer on backstory, mythos, and a brooding protagonist and it could be the next Halo series!
-
New Page Showcasing Text and Image Generating Programs Predating Contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Since I’ve been writing about different kinds of software that generate text and images without using modern artificial intelligence (AI), I wanted to thread them together on their own page under the Research heading in the site menu above and available here.
Currently, the page collects together my posts about image generating software KPT Bryce and Evolvotron, and text-generating software Electric Poet, Kant Generator Pro, Mac Prose, and McPoet 5.1. I will update that page with additional links as I publish posts about other pre-AI generative software.
-
Aerospace Exhibits at Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, March 2006
I got a chance to visit the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany during Spring Break of my last semester at Georgia Tech as an undergraduate student in 2006. The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter above is one of the magnificent aircraft on display there. You can easily walk around the aircraft and walk up the steps to peer into the cockpit. There are also pictures of an LN-3 Inertial Navigation System for the F-104, Me 262 Schwalbe jet fighter, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket interceptor, Henschel Hs 293 radio-guided bomb, Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter, Junkers Ju 52 tri-motor (c.f. 1929 Ford Tri-Motor that I wrote about yesterday), V-2 Rocket that has cutaway details that you can walk around from nose to tail, and other rocket motors cut down to reveal their inner components. Different views of some of these aircraft are available on my recent posts of photos from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) and the NASM Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
Also, there’s a photo of Friedrich Kaufmann’s Trumpet Player Automaton from the early 19th century, which reminds me of the Jaquet-Droz Automata that Y and I encountered in Switzerland in 2011 (reminding me that I need to post photos of them).
Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
LN-3 Inertial Navigation System
Messerschmitt Bf 109
Junkers Ju 52
Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe and Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet
Henschel Hs 293
V-2 Rocket with Cutaway Details
Miscellaneous Rocket Motors and Cutaways
Friedrich Kaufmann’s Trumpet Player Automaton (early 19th century)
-
Photos of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, August 2008
Yesterday, I shared photos of Y’s and my trip to the Stephen Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM). Today, I have some photos of our stop at the NASM on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
I think of museums of technology, like the NASM, as a kind of technical communication medium. Of course, the work of the displays, diagrams, multimedia, and explanatory text are different kinds of technical communication created to facilitate learning, contextualization, and curiosity. But, the museum as a whole–the system of the museum and its totality, its holism–is a giant technical communication medium, too.
Most of the exhibits seemed similar to the last time that I had visited Washington in the late 1980s, but one notable change is the restoration of the shooting model of Star Trek’s USS-1701 Enterprise, which used to hang in the air but it now at eye-level and encased in plastic (last photos below).
After our visit, the NASM did a big renovation of the museum on the National Mall and the Udvar-Hazy Center (i.e., the replacement of Space Shuttle Enterprise with Discovery).
Above and below, you can see Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic-crossing Spirit of St. Louis. More pictures of the historic air and spacecraft on display follow.
Spirit of St. Louis
Hughes H-1 Racer
Supermarine Spitfire HF. Mk. VIIc
North American P-51D Mustang
Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6/R3
Messerschmitt Me 262 A-1a Schwalbe (Swallow)
Mitsubishi A6M5 Reisen (Zero Fighter) Model 52 ZEKE
North American X-15
Douglas D-558-2
Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
Grumman X-29 full-scale model
SpaceShipOne and Bell X-1
SpaceShipOne
Bell X-1
John Glenn’s Spacesuit
Space Capsule Interior
Apollo 11 Command Module
Apollo Command Module Console
Lunar Module LM-2
Apollo-Soyuz Rendezvous Recreation
V-2 Rocket, Skylab, and V-1 Rocket
Viking Mars Lander
SAGE Core Memory Unit 11, IBM AN/FSQ-7
Boeing X-45A Unmanned Vehicle
Star Trek Shooting Model of the USS-1701 Enterprise
