Come Swim with OK Go!

Google and partnered with OK GO and a dance troupe to create another great music video. This take of "All is Not Lost" is a playful HTML5 music collaboration that lets you embed a message in the music video while the troupe dance to it. Sometimes the dancers seem underwater; other times, they seem to be water bugs or frogs scooting across the surface of a pond.

According to Google's daily blog, the site was built in HTML5 for use with the browser Google Chrome. As you'll see, various video clips move, or are rendered, in multiple browser windows that move, re-size, and re-align throughout the piece as the music changes.

In the Google blog post by Keiko Hirayama, a marketing manager for Google Tokyo, the collaboration had a "special significance" for the Google team in Japan. Apparently, the team worked alongside OK Go, and the message "All is Not Lost" is in support of all the people who were affected by Japan's earthquakes.

You can see our special message in the image with this post! For The Herald's coverage of OK GO, click here. For more information about the code behind this effort, click through to the Google Code Blog.

T. Enami's photos are brought back to life

Photographer Okinawa Soba and Flickr have partnered up to reanimate the stereoscopic photos of T. Enami (1859-1926) .

Stereoscopy is the art of making the illusion of 3-D photographs. The stereoscope required an eye wear device that shows each eye two different images of the same object at slightly different angles, creating an illusion of depth between the pair of photos. Created by Sir Charles
Wheatstone in 1940, the stereoscope was popular throughout the rest of the 19th-century and the early 20th century.

T. Enami was Nobukuni Enami's trade name. He was a famous photographer and collotypist of Japan's Meiji period. Enami was featured in National Geographic.

To see the top image animated and other stereoviews, go to Pink Tentacle.

Sources: Pink Tentacle, Wikipedia

By Brigette W.

The AWESOMENESS of Anime

As you may know, The Hillwood Herald interviewed Zara (aka "Words") from the Design for Giving Contest two weeks ago. Though we live across the world from each other (Zara lives in India), one thing we did have in common was our love for manga anime.

Manga is the Japanese form of a comic book. It is becoming increasingly popular in the Western world, and might even surpass the conventional Western comic book in popularity. Japanese manga is much more graceful and fluid than the average American comic book, the words flowing from each page to the next. Japanese manga-styled people are also pretty stylized, barely recognizable as human compared to one.

Animes are Japanese animations, usually based on successful mangas or Japanese light novels.

Some of the most famous mangas/animes include Astroboy by Osamu Tezuka, Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi, and Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo.

There four different genres of manga/anime most known in the Western world:

Kodomo: for children (ex: Doraemon, Happy Happy Clover...)

Shounen: for boys (ex: Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist, Bleach, Death Note...)

Shoujo: for girls (ex: Sailor Moon, Fruits Basket, Hell Girl, Vampire Knight...)

Seinen: for adults (ex: Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop...)

In addition, there are also many subcategories. Do not take manga and anime lightly, as they are more than the Sunday comics. Some are not appropriate for all ages, so it's a good idea to check the suggested age rating.

Pictures belong to: Nagaru Taniga (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), Yana Toboso (Kuroshitsuji) , and Shiro Masamune (Ghost in the Shell)

picture sources : o-tak-u.today.com, otakuworks.com, cyberpunkreview.com

By Brigette W.

The Earthquake in Japan — and How to Prepare for a Bay Area Quake

Give Herald readers an update about the earthquake in Japan, and use this an introduction to tell readers about how they can prepare for an earthquake. Use the following as sources:

• The New York Times
• US Geological Survey: Science for a Changing World (glance over the site's FAQ, or "frequently asked questions," and read this page on earthquake preparedness)
• Red Cross Earthquake preparedness
• An archived news article about San Francisco's 1906 earthquake (from The Times)