The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn (Wuppertal Suspension Railway), nicknamed The Flying Train, is basically a suspension railway in Wuppertal, Germany. It’s the world’s oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars and was built between 1897 and 1903. The first track opened in 1901, and to this day, Schwebebahn is still in use as a normal means of local public transport, transporting 25 million passengers annually. Read more to see how it looked during its early years, thanks to AI.
Photo credit: NASA
North American X-15, a hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft operated by the United States Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the fastest yet, setting numerous speed as well as altitude records in the 1960s. It reached the edge of outer space and returnied with valuable data used in aircraft and spacecraft design today. It set the official world record for the highest speed ever recorded by a crewed, powered aircraft, set in October 1967 when William J. Knight flew at Mach 6.70 (4,520 mph) at 102,100 feet. Read more for a video and additional information.
DOOM by id Software was released on MS-DOS on Dec. 10, 1993, and two-years later, it made its way to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Head programmer Randal Linden led the project and built a whole new game engine (Reality) to get the game running on a 16-bit console with severe memory and storage limitations. This week, Linden released the source code for fans to play around with. Read more for a video and additional information.
Denis Shiryaev has used AI-powered neural networks to upscale many historical video clips, and his latest project takes us back to the dawn of film taken in Tokyo, Japan between the years of 1913-1915. Some of the work done includes boosting FPS to 60 frames per second, fixing some playback speed issues, enhancing faces, thanks to the pipeline of algorithms designed for facial restoration, and upscaling resolution to 4k. Read more for the video and additional information.
Hasbro, Inc. partnered with Universal Brand Development and Amblin Entertainment today to reveal the first-ever Transformers-Back to the Future collaboration, starring the all new GIGAWATT. This new time-traveling Transformers Autobot commemorates 35 years since the groundbreaking adventure film, Back to the Future, took audiences back in time. Read more for a 20 things you might have missed in Back to the Future movies video and additional information.
Around 73-years ago, J. K. Raymond-Millet’s film Télévision: Oeil de Demain (“Television: Eye of Tomorrow”) may have been far ahead of its time. What started out as a simple educational science fiction film, turned out to be an eerily accurate depiction of how we use smartphones today. A four-minute excerpt recently surfaced and shows Parisians enjoying everyday life, but with a miniature TV in hand. Read more for two videos and additional information.
Photo credit: Vintage Everyday
The 1939-40 New York World’s Fair was held at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens and the second most expensive American world’s fair of all time. Many countries around the world exhibited, and over 44-million people attended the festivities in two seasons. Why? Well, it was the first exposition to showcase future technologies and “the world of tomorrow”. Read more for a video, additional pictures and information about the Pontiac ghost car that was at the show.
Long before the Apple Watch and any Google Wear OS devices, there was Seiko’s Ruputer. This smartwatch was released in 1998 and features a 16-bit, 3.6 MHz processor, 2 MB of non-volatile storage memory, 128 KB of RAM as well as a 102×64 pixel monochrome LCD. Other features include an 8-direction joystick, 6 function buttons, a serial interface and an IR port for communicating with other devices. Read more for two videos and additional information.
Photo credit: Unilad Tech
Ever wonder what the first detonation of a nuclear device looked like? If so, the test codenamed “Trinity” and conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. It happened in the Jornada del Muerto desert approximately 35-miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on the former USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, now part of White Sands Missile Range. Read more for a video and additional information.
For non-film aficionados, the Roundhay Garden Scene is basically an 1888 short silent actuality film recorded by French inventor Louis Le Prince at Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, Leeds, in the north of England. It’s believed to be the oldest surviving film in existence, but what happens when you use AI-powered neural networks to upscale it to 60FPS? Read more to find out, thanks to Denis Shiryaev.