Weekly Rewind: April 10th, 2020
Join us in this week's round-up of the best stories from the world wide web, including charity campaigns, authority art, and clever controllers.
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Kindness will keep us together
The British Red Cross has teamed up with a number of UK-based creatives including Anthony Burrill and Supermundane on its new campaign, Kindness will keep us together, which has been coordinated by VCCP.
Other artists who have contributed include Rose Blake, Rob Flowers, Yukai Du, Timothy Hunt, Ruby Taylor, Nina Cosford, Bett Norris, Cajsa Holgersson, and Oli Frape, who each offer a different visual approach to the message that while the virus may keep us apart, kindness will keep us together.
To help spread the message and drive donations, 100 limited edition prints are on sale on the British Red Cross site, while black and white versions of the posters are available for children (and adults) to download, colour in, and share on social media or in their windows.
Drawing on expert opinion
We're all news junkies at the moment. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic has touched almost everyone across the world, and people want and need to find out what's going on. But getting accurate information from the right sources is of paramount importance, and can help save lives. As a society though, we often listen to celebrities or the loudest voices over qualified professionals. This sparked an idea for US agency, Butler Shine Stern & Partners, who asked; what if we turned the frontline experts into pop culture icons?
BSSP has launched #FauciArt— shining a light on American physician and immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci. It’s a call to action to turn this expert's image into a work of art. #FauciArt started as an internal initiative; each department at the agency got together and created their own art pieces. Now the idea has grown and BSSP is challenging everyone to create their own #FauciArt, posing the design challenge to well-known artists, other agencies, local art schools and anyone that wants to join in, tagging #FauciArt as they post their masterpieces.
By opening the idea up to the world and encouraging everyone to join in, BSSP is hoping they can keep Dr. Fauci in the spotlight, right where he's needed.
Feel in control
Dropping in, out of the blue, on their own blog, Sony have this week introduced the design and technical updates in the controller for the upcoming PlayStation 5 console. Going by the name DualSense (dropping the 'shock' of previous iterations), the controller has a sleek, two-tone look, in-built mics and speakers and the addition of an intriguing 'Create' button.
Most interesting of all, however, is the companies adoption of haptic technology and adaptive triggers to allow players to 'feel' the game whilst playing. This can vary from a change in the road surface in driving games to giving the feeling of drawing a bow in more action-oriented fare. Whatever the benefit, it's nice to know that the concept of touch isn't totally being lost in 2020.
Light-speed laser beams towards Earth
Black holes are already terrifying enough, but imagine if you, as an ardent observer of the awful and unknown vastness of space, are watching as black hole emits a beam of energy that is not only heading right towards you, on Earth, but also appears to travel at twenty times the speed of light. Honestly this sounds like the nightmare scenario that really could only happen in the midst of a global crises, but rest easy, the superluminal ray (that's the scientific term for death beam, apparently) is only traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light, and not twenty times the universal speed limit, Vice reports.
The optical illusion caused some confusion over at the Event Horizon Telescope lab (honestly, you are just setting yourself up for an alien invasion with a name like that), but after more careful study of the most bizarre natural phenomena to ever occur in the dark expansive void, the blazar jet has been determined not to be defying the laws of physics. The lab, for some reason, is thrilled about this observation and hopes to use the superluminal beam to further study on black holes, which for all intents and purposes, seem so eager to be left alone that they are willing to fire a warning shot towards Earth just to get us to back off. That might just be me though.
