I also built a wall (with literal wallpaper even!) in order to create the cover for a genealogy book that I created.
I knew what a wanted — an old fashioned looking wall with old-timey pictures of my relatives hanging on the wall. I also wanted a mantel with more photos standing on it that would run along near the bottom of the book cover.
I tried initially creating the cover in a paint program — layering elements together (wallpaper, photo frames, photos), adding drop shadows, but it wasn't coming together.
So I went to Lowe's and bought a 4' x 8' sheet of 2" insulating foam or some such, bought what looked like the oldest-fashioned wall paper, a gallon of paint, etc. In the end I messed up the lighting, but I suppose that is something I am still learning in photography. But I still liked the result.
My home studio doesn't have plain, unobstructed walls for some simple shots, and while a paper roll backdrop is a good substitute, sometimes you want a wall, or a corner, or you just want to use wallpaper.
So I built a massive construction with doubled-up cardboard sheet, girders made with pallet corners, these gigantic split pin things and hot glue, and then I spray-mounted wallpaper on it.
I also did it at the wrong time of year, when the air was still too damp and the heating needed to be on, so it didn't last an enormously long time before things rippled, because it turns out cardboard has some quite organic behaviours in moist air.
So it was almost a failure. But I'd absolutely do it again, replacing the cardboard with foamcore or thicker insulating board.
It was a really fascinating, liberating process to take that much control over the process, and I've been doing similar since, assembling my own photographic tools to a level that looks a bit like obsession.
I think maybe many software developers here don't understand the parallels between doing this sort of thing and assembling your "stack" for a few applications.
A true photographer's "tools" barely even start with the camera. There's a whole array of tools beyond that, beyond peripherals, that extend into the scene or into methodology.
bonki 148 days ago [-]
The lightning might indeed not be the best but I really like it, well done!
ErigmolCt 147 days ago [-]
The result is amazing! It reads the direction of the book on the cover.
esjeon 148 days ago [-]
I've been spending a lot of time on photography (though mostly w/ film cameras) during recent years, and only recently realized this is actually photographed. (It took long because I'm a long-time Linux user, so I barely seen the image.)
Many people say this would've been easier with VFX, but I disagree. The image has highly convincing details that would take a long time even for highly talented VFX artists to nail. Instead, with a camera, you can let the world do the work for you. The studio setup is also very simple (cardboard + acrylic panel + projector + fog) and easy to experiment with. I'm pretty sure photography was the right tool for the project.
snowwrestler 148 days ago [-]
I think if you handed this image to a VFX artist and said “make this,” they could do it. They probably could have done it back in 2015, too.
But the team making this image didn’t have it in advance. They just had some ideas they wanted to try out.
The story of how it was made is not just the story of the techniques they used, but also how they applied and adjusted those techniques to try things and see how it looked.
This image was “made” in that people built the stuff that was photographed, but it was also kind of “discovered” in that they tried a bunch of things until they discovered what they liked.
That’s possible in VFX too, but the process is different and too many iterations can quickly erase any cost advantage. This is one reason animated movies are disciplined about locking the script early in production. You can’t cost-effectively improv your way through an animated movie the way a director and actors can with a camera and a set.
ecjhdnc2025 148 days ago [-]
I agree with all of this -- particularly the exploration and discovery aspects.
But a side note on this:
> You can’t cost-effectively improv your way through an animated movie the way a director and actors can with a camera and a set.
The Jim Henson Company is working on exactly the technology that supports this, actually -- the business of live puppetry capture as distinct from, say, motion capture.
This kit is expensive/bespoke but I don't know that it's _that_ expensive, set against how much money goes into making movies with large-scale bluescreen work these days. And it's wholly amenable to improv.
And now we are completely drowning in VTubers, who use software like Live2d that analyzes a webcam image and uses it to control the motions of a pre-made 2D character. I've only ever seen it done to spice up the video of people streaming video games but I'm sure there's someone doing no-budget cartoons with it. There's also Adobe Character Animator, which has been used for various TV stuff like a live performance of Homer Simpson or a few low-budget shows.
And then there's VRChat; a few thousand dollars of head-mounted display/facial capture/body trackers and you can get realtime full-body tracking. There's probably someone fucking around with making movies this way too.
At this point I'm pretty sure that you could get most of the functionality of that hand-tooled puppetry gizmo by just taking a sock and gluing a couple of ping-pong balls onto it and tweaking some tracking software.
Spaghetti Sorting is just one of the Analog Gadgets called out in Dewdney's "The Armchair Universe" (originally in his Computer Recreations column in "Scientific American"). There are many other cool ones (beginning on page 28):
>> contact-and-removal operation takes constant time, the worst-case time complexity of the algorithm is O(n).
How is the contact-and-removal operation constant time? How can that assumption ever be true? If you use a parallel processor like human vision or human feel (ie. which pressure nerve activates on the hand) it may appear constant, but if you use a computer it would be n right (as you would need to check n slots). Wouldn't either defy O(n)?
dahart 148 days ago [-]
The analog algorithm described is not described for digital computer. It’s an amusing theoretical thought experiment and not a recipe for actual fast sorting. It’s O(n) when you use your hand for contact and removal. I don’t know if it’s possible to implement spaghetti sort on a computer, maybe not, but I guess if it were possible, it would probably at least require n processors to sort n elements. Maybe the nearest analogy on digital computers is radix sort.
Izkata 148 days ago [-]
Radix sort is probably the closest usable one, but a more direct translation would probably be sleep sort.
dahart 148 days ago [-]
Oh yeah I forgot about sleep sort, that is similar and also more in the same spirit as spaghetti sort. ;)
posix86 147 days ago [-]
Depends on the mathematical framework you're working with.... there's a genre in theoretical compsci that deals with parallel algorithms, and as a toy example, I remember an O(1) sorting algo (given O(n^2) processors). This example is more fun than anything, but ofc in general you're free what constraints you subject your statements to.
sdwr 148 days ago [-]
You can simplify the "human hand" to a rigid metal sheet that comes down from the top and stops on the highest object. Still constant time, but no "parallel processing" needed.
The point is that reality itself is highly parallel
lambdaxyzw 147 days ago [-]
I wonder if the removal operation is not actually O(sqrt(n)). Depending on the way we structure thought experiment of course. But as the pile of spaghetti gets bigger, the act of picking the largest one is constrained by:
1. how fast your hand can reach for the next spaghetti piece - on average proportional to the radius of the pile of spaghetti, which is proportional to sqrt(n).
2. to actually notice the biggest piece, you need to again wait for a time proportional to sqrt(n) - light propagation is not instant.
So if we start thinking about this algorithm more like a computer scientist would (how fast it is as n grows to the infinity) it doesn't seem to be O(n) IMO.
thfuran 148 days ago [-]
You're talking about some other kind of sort.
bravetraveler 148 days ago [-]
That's how some 'trick' card decks work, for anyone unfamiliar
tshaddox 148 days ago [-]
Of course, all computation is just setting up some physical stuff in such a way that, after the laws of physics play themselves out for a while, that physical stuff will be in a new state, and you'll be able to interpret your desired result from that new state.
kqr 148 days ago [-]
Which details are you thinking of? I was under the impression that with ray tracing, physically based materials, and fluid dynamics our computers wouldn't be hard-pressed to realistically render a static scene with light (of varying coherence and other properties) going through a piece of plastic and hitting swirling fog.
The parameters of the scene need to be set up, yes, but then it would be just as easy to generate a few thousand frames from it. Also it's easier to version control for experimentation.
magicalhippo 148 days ago [-]
Specular reflections and diffuse media (fog) makes for massive render times though, in my experience.
I did something similarish with water a long time ago, using a spectral renderer, finding spectral data for ocean water absorption and reflection, realistic spectral sun/sky model, and a physically-based ocean wave simulator to create the surface.
The underwater "caustic god rays" looked very nice and realistic, and setting it all up was easy once I had found the data. But it took ages to get rid of the noise.
148 days ago [-]
kthartic 148 days ago [-]
In 2015 (almost 10 years ago now) the tech probably wasn't as convincing as it is today. But I agree you could probably get like 90% there
dahart 148 days ago [-]
That’s a reasonable guess if you don’t follow graphics developments, but the tech for producing realism hasn’t changed that much in the last 10 years, most of the realism developments have been incremental. The main thing that’s happened in CG in the last 10 years is speed and scale improvements. There were great fake-or-real CG photo contests in 2015 and earlier where some of the CG was photoreal enough to trick most people. The Windows wallpaper definitely could have been 100% there 10 years ago, for a skilled CG artist who knew what they wanted. The reasons for doing it practical don’t necessarily hinge on whether it was possible to do it in CG, there are good reasons to do it physically anyway.
xattt 148 days ago [-]
The Stranger Things intro scene is CGI. Artists were consulted who originally created similar titles in the 80s with practical effects to see how they could do it too. The old-school artists said to just do it in CGI because that’s what they would have done.
bombcar 148 days ago [-]
People don’t hate CGI - they hate bad CGI. It’s hard to explain, but you know it when you see it.
Bad practical effects do exist, but even when bad they don’t look “unnatural”.
jcl 148 days ago [-]
I recall Amazon’s Lord of the Rings title sequence [1] received some criticism for looking fake, even though they filmed it practically [2]. I’d guess it was due to folks assuming title sequences are CGI, combined with the fact that few people really know what poured liquid metal is supposed to look like.
There's a similar problem with gunshots and explosions - we want what movies have given us which is not what they actually act/sound like - so much so that live recordings of actual gunfire/explosions is often deemed "fake".
ska 148 days ago [-]
This is also the American/bald eagle problem. When people hear their actual cries, they’re often confused.
Yes. But why would you do all these computer-ish things to provide a backdrop for a computer? Where is the creativity in that? Where is the attitude, the whimsy, the irony, the juxtaposition?
Considering how much of current technology stems from geeks just proving that their crazy idea could work and looking for money for it afterwards, the disrespect here for another geek's craft and intuitions is wild.
148 days ago [-]
starstripe 148 days ago [-]
I would have used VFX for this as I'm pretty sure it would have been more cost effective to achieve a similar result. Most people, like me, probably just assumed this was VFX anyway. But I'm glad Microsoft didn't though, as this is a fascinating story and case study.
mateus1 148 days ago [-]
Microsoft surely wasn’t too worried about the cost.
dr-detroit 148 days ago [-]
the ironic thing is they have all those photos of real life places they use for wallpaper those are all photshopped to an insane degree to remove the ugly trees and clouds and other natural formations and make the colors extremely different
theeandthy 148 days ago [-]
Honestly it’s way more satisfying to work analog. Experiencing the colors in “real life” spatially. Also, collaborating with others and being able to share the process in a studio rather than on a screen is an amazing experience.
Another thing is the fog rising up to create diffusion on the light. Even the best VFX in the world will only ever be an approximation to the real thing.
noname120 148 days ago [-]
Nah that's post hoc rationalization. The amount of busy-work that went into it is ridiculous. Just because a colossal amount of effort was poured in this wallpaper doesn't mean that they used the right tool for the job or that the output was better because of it.
sph 148 days ago [-]
You're thinking like an engineer, and speak as if there is a right amount of time to spend on artistic endeavours; if you cross this threshold for you it is a "ridiculous and colossal amount of effort".
Budget aside, art isn't constrained or criticized by how much effort the artist put in.
All that matters is the result. A wallpaper or any other artistic creation isn't less beautiful or evocative because the artist spent thousands of hours on it.
surgicalcolor 148 days ago [-]
No, he's just being realistic.
Even without getting into semantics about "what is art", the reality is that this is promotional material for advertising. This wasn't commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMA.
This isn't to take away from the artists skill, effort, creativity etc. but the context of this is inherently a business and economic decision. There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is. It's a very typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase success or whatever.
dspillett 148 days ago [-]
> Even without getting into semantics about "what is art"
They say, before making comments about what they think is art :-)
> There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
There is, as you state in your next couple of sentences:
> … monopolistic megacorp funded to show off … typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase
You can, probably rightly, call it a crappy impetus. But that was impetus for the exercise and could be called the artistic impetus. Even if you disagree strongly on that particular point, it is definitely a message.
To be slightly more fair, that wallpaper is a major part of the initial impression people have of the OS version, much like XP's Telly Tubby Hill did. The XP image was trying to convey “friendly, welcoming”, the Win10 one tries to convey something more like “dynamic, technically competent, flashy”. While it may not be an expression of someone's inner feelings or a societal property or anything like that, some art is more about directing your impression of something than it is about expressing someone else's and that is what this image was for and what it does.
ecjhdnc2025 148 days ago [-]
> Even without getting into semantics about "what is art", the reality is that this is promotional material for advertising. This wasn't commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMA.
99.9999% of all art is not commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMa. It's just something that artists do.
IT geeks are all for imposing their own creative restrictions on their work -- using Haskell when the competition is using PHP, developing their own distributed network persistence layer on top of SQLite when there are products out there that already exist but they just don't like for pseudospiritual reasons.
But artists who just make pictures are expected to be cost-effective and not to put any value on their artisanship?
sph 148 days ago [-]
You know, it's art even if it has no ambitions to be exhibited at the MoMA.
> It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is.
Groan. It's not possible to have a serious discussions with someone starting from such a cynical position. After all, what is even the point of creating anything? We're all going to turn to dust and be forgotten forevermore.
TheOtherHobbes 147 days ago [-]
The point is it's poorly done by the standard you'd expect from top level no-expense-spared commercial graphic design. And that reflects poorly on the company and the product.
The Win XP field was the opposite. It was organic, calming, and oddly fascinating because you couldn't tell if it was a plain photo or an edit or... what. And it had an unexpected reference to the Windows branding in the composition.
Win 10 was more like meaningless window-shaped visual noise.
sph 147 days ago [-]
Again, it does not matter, and it is entirely subjective, if art is poorly done or not. It does not matter if it doesn't calm you. It does not matter if it reflects poorly on Microsoft. Why do you care so much?
Like it or not, art exists in a vacuum. It does not need to justify its existence. That's the very definition of art.
TheOtherHobbes 147 days ago [-]
It's a ridiculous and colossal amount of effort from (I think...) 34 people for something that looks like it was knocked together in a garage.
The proportions and composition are weird, messy, and obviously asymmetric in both axes. Both the horizontals and verticals are slightly off, which makes it feel unsettled.
It seems quite clumsily edited, with a blotchy cut-off at the left that feels claustrophobic and doesn't seem to be there for a good aesthetic reason.
IMO it would have been stronger and more powerful rotated left through 90 degrees so the light was shining down.
dev1ycan 148 days ago [-]
"All that matters is the result. A wallpaper or any other artistic creation isn't less beautiful or evocative because the artist spent thousands of hours on it."
Disagree, HEAVILY, a ton of the biggest marvels in the world are so because of how much work was put into them.
ecjhdnc2025 148 days ago [-]
There's a right amount of time for artistic endeavours and it has all been used up by our niche metaprogramming project.
ErigmolCt 147 days ago [-]
I think the process of creation is the thing
actionfromafar 148 days ago [-]
Also pretty sure it was the fun tool for the project.
148 days ago [-]
pavon 148 days ago [-]
I always assumed it was CG because there are aspects that look unrealistic to me, in particular the bloom along the edges is too bright compared to the illumination of the rest of the panes and the light beams coming from the on the corners looked artificial. Turns out it looks this way because they projected brighter light on the edges and corners. Neat.
When I saw this headline I mixed up windows versions and thought it was going to be about the Windows 11 Bloom backgrounds, which I always assumed were made with physical materials, but it seems like I am wrong about that one too, hah!
amelius 148 days ago [-]
> with a camera, you can let the world do the work for you
How do you let the "world" remove your greasy fingerprints from the glass?
Agreed. As a tech artist, I'm 100% positive I could get a bang-on reproduction using Arnold or some other really solid photorealistic rendering engine, but it would probably take longer than using real cameras, practical props, and doing a bit of massaging in post. The modeling, color, camera angle/focus length/etc. are all really easy. Tweaking the subtleties in the light, glass shaders, fog, etc to get them good would take quite some time. It would only make sense if it needed to be animated or you needed a bunch of versions with modifications. Definitely a 'use the right tool for the job' kind of thing.
FootballMuse 148 days ago [-]
TBF, the blender version you reference was from an animation, not the first single still render.
> Unfortunately, due to the nature of volumetric rendering, I was unable to economically render the final animation at a high resolution with enough samples. So I had to resort to denoising, which sadly degraded the image quality and made it a bit flickery.
> Perhaps, with enough computing power, I'll be able to return to this project in the future and provide a cleaner final render.
hu3 148 days ago [-]
And so the remaining 20% of the work will take another 80% of effort.
Classic
NayamAmarshe 148 days ago [-]
No, not really. Increasing the volumetric samples + bounces size is fairly simple. It's just a value in the rendering tab.
dessimus 148 days ago [-]
The video is 13 minutes, but its a time lapse so it could have been hours or days of work.
nar001 148 days ago [-]
Copying is a lot easier than creating though, the Windows team had to start from scratch
skrebbel 148 days ago [-]
Your comment made me laugh because out of context, it suggests “the Windows team” is averse to copying things.
dspillett 148 days ago [-]
Not that I'm saying the video doesn't show some skill, but creating a fresh image from scratch is quite a different task from recreating an existing one directly from a reference.
JKCalhoun 148 days ago [-]
Regardless, the photographers may well encounter those amazing "happy accidents" (something that so rarely happens when I use software).
doikor 148 days ago [-]
It doesn't look as good and Blender/3d modeling software in general have come a long way in the last 9 years or so (Windows 10 came out in 2015)
Sure it could can/could be done but it would take a lot of time to get as good a result. Probably easier to just photograph it for real and photoshop a little bit.
rad_gruchalski 148 days ago [-]
The time lapse is 13 minutes long.
robertlagrant 147 days ago [-]
That's a cool animated wallpaper.
PKop 148 days ago [-]
Looks terrible and not all that similar.
148 days ago [-]
disillusioned 148 days ago [-]
Despite having seen this image thousands of times, I never considered it might have originated from practical effects, even if it was composited. Very cool.
The composite sounds like no picnic, either:
>With over 3,000 photos captured from the shoot, the initial stage of the composite was an exercise in patience as Munko diligently went through all of the assets and picked the best ones suited for the final image. He then dusted off his old 40 year-old designer fingers and brought them into Photoshop where he tirelessly combined exposures at a blistering 9k resolution.
He first build up the base image, which was obviously the foundation for the hero still, flushing out the core logo design with a variety of laser-infused illuminations.. These core layers were varied, ranging from minimal rim-lighting to a multitude of laser lines fanning through the central portions of the logo, lighting up the volumetric haze in a variety of artful ways. Compositing all these layers together was an extremely iterative process and was done in collaboration with Daddy Bear Art Director Ryan Vulk and Creative Director Christopher Ashworth, the two senior Directors on the Windows Brand Team.
Once the lovelies at the Windows team and up the ladder at Microsoft were happy with the aesthetics of the logo foundation, Munko then composited in the environmental passes, which consisted of separately shot layers of smoke and haze to create a very moody palette and accentuated the qualities of the practical approach.
The final touches were the lens flares, which were again shot as separate passes but were flaring the lens with a light source positioned in the same place as the laser projector, so the flares lined up perfectly with all the other passes. The final grade was applied to bring everything into the signature ‘Microsoft Blue’ palette, but still leaving a tonal range that kept everyone happy. The final 9k file was then sent to the magicians at XYZ Creative Production Agency, who specialize in high-end photo retouching and did the final optimizations on the hero image.
MarioMan 148 days ago [-]
This is basically how product photography works if you’re on a budget. You keep the camera fixed in place but adjust the lighting between shots. Then, in post, choose your favorite components of each image and composite them together in Photoshop. I like watching a YouTube channel called “workphlo” that does this. The core process is the same for all of the items, but it’s quite enjoyable to see him vary the techniques.
Compositing like this is a nearly inevitable part of almost all product photography, I think? Anything that has motion will lean towards compositing for all the surrounding elements. Except those incredible people who built motion rigs for burger drop ads.
Capture One (the kinda sorta still industry standard tethering/photography capture software in the marketing industry, for all the high-end kit) has a really nice tool to help with previsualising compositing live.
MarioMan 148 days ago [-]
Agreed. My thought on this enabling a "budget" option is that you can get the look of an expensive, multi-light studio with just a single speedlight and a lot of compositing.
ghusbands 148 days ago [-]
This comment is just a copy/paste of a quarter of the article.
eganist 148 days ago [-]
It looks like it was just a mis-quote. All the paragraphs below the quoted one are included as part of the quote but don't begin with the leading >
speedgoose 148 days ago [-]
It’s perhaps an effective strategy to force us to read the articles.
bmacho 148 days ago [-]
I skip long comments the same way I skip the article (I opened this one tho, for the picture)
arjonagelhout 148 days ago [-]
[flagged]
lordgrenville 148 days ago [-]
When I saw the headline I confused it with the one from XP [0], and was imagining a team constructing that hill, laying the grass, etc.
> With Bliss, Microsoft went a step further than merely licensing it: they bought the full rights to the image meaning no company would ever be able to license the photo from Corbis again, as the image was often used as part of XP's marketing and the Luna theme is modelled around its color scheme. It was purchased for an undisclosed amount of money in the low six figures; O'Rear cannot reveal the exact amount without violating a non disclosure agreement. He did not receive the full cost as Corbis handled the sale. As a result of its Microsoft acquisition, it was permanently removed from Corbis' website and has never been available on Getty Images or other sites that Corbis cross-licensed photos to. The vertical shot was also included in the acquisition, as O'Rear cannot release it due to his agreement with Microsoft.
SamBam 148 days ago [-]
I mean, that's not surprising at all that they would want to own the image. It would be ridiculous if that was also being used to advertise vaping or Bitcoin or something.
For a moment I confused it with the one from W11 and wondered how they got all the folds so smooth and uniformly spaced.
148 days ago [-]
snowwrestler 148 days ago [-]
Also interesting: Brian Eno on his work composing one of the Windows startup sounds:
> Q: How did you come to compose "The Microsoft Sound"?
> A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem -- solve it."
> The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."
This bit has always stuck in my head. Makes his longnow foundation work make more sense. Always find it wild that microsoft takes the time and spends the money on such tiny details in their products.
asimovfan 148 days ago [-]
Although this is great somehow in my opinion this was the best windoze wallpaper
It somehow captures my soul, perhaps because i was very young when i saw it
That Microsoft Natural Elite on the left side of the image is still the only keyboard I use, or will use. I have a stack of four backups in the closet.
magic_hamster 148 days ago [-]
As already mentioned it was the install setup, and it's my favorite Windows background to date as well. It's actually a 2 bit image with all blue and black, with dithering. It's very comforting in my opinion.
edvards 148 days ago [-]
Is there a name for this visual style?
lewiscollard 148 days ago [-]
(Disclaimer: no special insights into what Microsoft was doing at the time; I merely lived in the same era.)
I'd call it an artifact of only having 16 colours to work with when SETUP boots. Obviously, most machines at the time had more to work with than that, but VGA - which is to say, 16 colors at 640x480 - was the baseline. And remember that Windows 95 could be installed from _floppies_; looking fancy is good, but you don't want to gratuitously use disk space. No multiple versions of the same image for you!
Let's take this fancy "Mac with some other random shit on a desk" image from Unsplash:
(I know, the images are small on a modern display! Each square is full-size, because we're VGA.)
Top left is the original, obviously. Top right is what happens if you just reduce it to 16 colours; it looks like nothing in particular, and it weighs in at 153K (exported in a modern graphics editor), or more than a tenth of a 3.5" floppy disk. Bottom left is what happens if you do it with dithering; you can make it look like you have more colours than you actually do, but it also weighs 153K.
And bottom right is SETUP.BMP. It only uses _two_ colours from the palette ("0, 0, 255" blue and black). That's 1-bit colour which means my SETUP.BMP when exported to an actual BMP only takes up 38.5 kilobytes.
So the answer to your question, I suppose, is "use as few colours as possible and don't waste disk space" or "dithering" or "the 90s", but often the technical limitations of a period plus time become an aesthetic.
reddalo 148 days ago [-]
I also wonder this. It's a recurring style from '90s software.
isametry 148 days ago [-]
I don’t have an exact answer either, but based on this particular image, “duotone effect” is definitely a keyword.
nom 148 days ago [-]
If you refer to the color and not the composition, it's called halftone. Unlike analog halftones, you calculate where to place the dots in a way that minimizes visual error, called dithering.
w4rh4wk5 148 days ago [-]
Something I find deeply funny about this is the amount of work invested here just to have the default background quality setting in Windows 10 still be < 100%.
That's the Microsoft I am used to ^^
rjmunro 148 days ago [-]
What is the "default background quality setting"? (I'm not a windows user)
benjaminpv 148 days ago [-]
In Windows when you set a wallpaper it (sometimes) silently transcodes the one you selected into a new, smaller version. It doesn't always, there's a heuristic, but it's assumed it happens to prevent people from selecting a 1TB terapixel photo and have it destroy the machine.
Anyway, since it transcodes the WP into a JPEG, it has the ability to select a compression ratio. That ratio is pretty famously < 100% and as a result there's some degenerate cases where a wallpaper that looks good when viewed in the filesystem looks terrible when set to the background.
I've seen machines which needed to swap to show the desktop, because the wallpaper was a high/true-colour BMP and it was like half the memory the machine had!
Scharkenberg 148 days ago [-]
The size threshold is now at 25 MB, I think.
Dalewyn 148 days ago [-]
By far the most appropriate use of the word "degenerate" in the derogatory sense.
drewzero1 148 days ago [-]
Right, I feel like between that and seeing it a lot over remote desktop I've never really appreciated the quality of the original. I always liked the wallpaper set from the windows 9x era because they were designed to look good in low quality 256-color modes.
jonplackett 148 days ago [-]
Shame MS don’t spend this much time on effort on… every other part of their design for everything.
simmerup 148 days ago [-]
They do, that’s why they have like 5 competing design languages
ZuLuuuuuu 148 days ago [-]
Imagine if they spent the same time for fixing/improving the search bar on Windows instead of the recently announced Recall feature.
blitzar 148 days ago [-]
Microsoft aggressively filters out this type of substandard employee in their interview process.
pompino 148 days ago [-]
They don't need to because you can't argue with success. They continue to have the dominant product in the space for several decades.
isametry 148 days ago [-]
Successful product != well-designed product.
Microsoft got Windows where it is by having no sense of self-respect and willing to play the B2B race to the bottom. And it remains dominant thanks to decades' worth of legacy software that needs to continue running.
So that's cheapness and momentum.
If Windows was ever a beautiful product, it certainly isn't now. It would never become popular today in its current shape and principles.
pompino 148 days ago [-]
>Successful product != well-designed product.
Anyone can say that about any product. That doesn't make it true. Windows is a successful product that satisfies a need that people and businesses have. You can't fake dollar bills.
>Microsoft got Windows where it is by having no sense of self-respect and willing to play the B2B race to the bottom. And it remains dominant thanks to decades' worth of legacy software that needs to continue running.
>So that's cheapness and momentum.
>If Windows was ever a beautiful product, it certainly isn't now. It would never become popular today in its current shape and principles.
I'd rather sell a hundred million copies than convince some randos on the internet that my software is "beautiful".
Kwpolska 148 days ago [-]
The original Windows 10 wallpaper. In a later release, it was replaced by a brighter and cleaner version that was drawn on a computer. I personally prefer the later revision.
noname120 148 days ago [-]
> replaced by a brighter and cleaner version that was drawn on a computer
Can you source this statement?
leoedin 148 days ago [-]
I went looking - and there's a wiki dedicated to just this topic.
It does seem that the original was replaced in May 2019 by a brighter version, although whether it was drawn on a computer or not is anyone's guess.
jerbear4328 148 days ago [-]
According to the wiki, it was not drawn on a computer, but created again in the same way as the first. I personally prefer the darker original, but most Windows users use light mode. It's cool that it has 25 people listed in the credits for what seems like a such a simple image.
> GMUNK was also involved in this version, and stated that it was created under the same methodology as the previous version.
If you have a chance and are interested in the subject, I highly recommend the Musée Cinéma & Miniature in Lyon, France: <https://www.museeminiatureetcinema.fr/>.
A lot of the promotional material highlights the sets, costumes and props from films on display, and they are certainly interesting, but far more interesting to me are the two floors of cinematic miniatures--diorama after diorama of physically-built miniature sets used as "virtual backgrounds" before they were mostly generated using CGI art (which I do appreciate). They are remarkable and remarkably interesting as pieces of art as well as cinema history. This story reminded me of this--sometimes the effect you want needs a tactile realism that is hard to replicate digitally, and is rarely as neat and toy-like.
checkyoursudo 136 days ago [-]
> Our approach involved a live-action shoot using different variables and customizations.
What does "live-action shoot" mean in this statement? Wouldn't this just be "still photography"? When I think of live action, I think of people or at least ... action?
These are nice wallpapers. I hope this works with the Variety wallpaper manager.
trojanalert 148 days ago [-]
This is so over-engineered, it tells you that when you have billions, you do the most whacky things. A 5-minute VFX job will yield the same results. But no, there's so much f*k you money, they had to do this.
taejavu 148 days ago [-]
I would love to see the results of your 5 minute VFX job.
blowski 148 days ago [-]
Traditionally, one of Microsoft's weaknesses was how crappy it looked against Apple. Maybe they are trying to say "we care a lot about making this look good".
mabster 148 days ago [-]
My favourite is a production team spending millions on something trying to make it look like a home movie, etc.
high_na_euv 148 days ago [-]
On the other hand this will be shown to bilions of people almost everyday as a front screen of Windows
jimbobthrowawy 147 days ago [-]
I hope that the artists creating the image knew that whatever they submitted would be the most displayed image worldwide, for a couple of years.
JusticeJuice 148 days ago [-]
The cost of this shoot would pale in comparison to the marketing budget.
Pawka 148 days ago [-]
That was my first impression too. Curious what is the cost of wallpaper.
all2 148 days ago [-]
This is one of my favorite examples of practical effects. I hate windows as an OS, but I still admire this every time I log in at work.
thaumasiotes 148 days ago [-]
Why wouldn't you set a better background image?
sanderjd 148 days ago [-]
I think this is actually an interesting question. I think I've been leaving on the default desktop on any computer I use, for over a decade now. It's not just that, it's every kind of setting. I just don't futz around with things that don't actively get in the way of my work anymore. I used to love to tweak everything, to try to pour my personality into a sweet computer setup, but after using computers for fifteen years or so, I just lost interest in that.
all2 146 days ago [-]
I've settled on a slightly custom setup based on Plasma and i3wm. It involves a single systemd unit running in user space. I get batteries included desktop environment and a tiling window manager I can tolerate. I also set up zsh+powerlevel10k. In all it takes me about 20 minutes to configure.
dantondwa 148 days ago [-]
Note that the latest version of this wallpaper is CGI. [1]
I don't know if there's a name for this genre of photography (it's not exactly
"abstract" since clearly things are being represented), but another example is the cover of Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News [0], which looks like a digital drawing or composite but was physically built and photographed by bandleader Isaac Brock.
We must not forget the legal side of this. Microsoft knows everything about intellectual property rights. If I were going to design a logo to be displayed literally billions of times across every screen running the windows OS I would make very sure it was beyond any conceivable infringement allegation. A generated smoke image might be up for some allegation of copying, that the generated smoke or some other aspect was "created" by the software. A physical photo shoot means zero possibility of any outsider having any contribution in the final image.
layer8 148 days ago [-]
I always found that wallpaper a weird choice, being dark-depressing and uninviting to the average user.
fckgw 148 days ago [-]
I believe Windows 10 was the first with a dark mode built in. Maybe to compliment that?
layer8 147 days ago [-]
There are ways to make a dark background that looks inviting, but this is not it. And it has enough bright highlights to make it uncomfortable when you actually like to have a dark screen in a dark environment, so it’s also not a particularly good dark-mode background.
behnamoh 148 days ago [-]
I remember the good old days when I would spend so much time choosing the right wallpapers for my PC and phone. Nowadays, the wallpaper is completely hidden from me because I am constantly switching between apps on macOS thanks to my Raycast custom keyboard shortcuts and I never see whatever picture I set...
It's a weird feeling. Kinda like letting go of the desktop-oriented computer in favor of window-manager-oriented. There's beauty in the former, and simplicity and elegance in the latter.
HenryBemis 148 days ago [-]
I used (like many many many) to do this. And one day I thought to myself.. hey.. that greenish background color of Win NT was cool (R0, G128, B128), wasn't it?
And then the Windows 2000 blue.. oh how beautiful.. (R60, G110, B166).
And later in life i switched to total black with dark mode for all my devices (and my eyes thanked me for it :)
I hope someone will one day talk about me the way corporate america talks about its logos.
sanderjd 148 days ago [-]
Yeah when I read things like this, I always sit in awed wonder for a moment, trying to figure out where these people are totally full of crap, or whether they really think about things this way, and are just very different than me.
sanderjd 148 days ago [-]
Too late to edit, but I meant to say *whether they are totally full of crap, ...
ErigmolCt 147 days ago [-]
Brand identity is a big thing
d--b 148 days ago [-]
Oh, how I wish my cloud workstation was just a HD cam pointed at boxes somewhere in Pennsylvania, and people just changing things very quickly.
gonzo41 148 days ago [-]
Unpopular opinion, the windows logo peaked at 3.1.
My only other though is that I'm surprised this many people were needed to take that photo.
toast0 148 days ago [-]
I never saw it in the wild, but the windows < 3 logo is pretty neat. But the typography is serif heavy which lots of people don't like.
LoganDark 148 days ago [-]
The alternative versions of this wallpaper are extremely pretty. I think it's awesome that they've been made available like this, I just wish they were available at a higher resolution. Would love to use one of the red or purple ones on my 4K display.
725686 148 days ago [-]
The very first thing I did when installing Windows 10 was changing the desktop image. It amazes me how many resources companies put into stuff that users don't give a peanut.
kookamamie 148 days ago [-]
To me as a photographer and as computer vision expert, this sounds wayyyyyy over-engineered and -produced. I get that there's a big vision (and budget) involved, but c'mon!
cranium 148 days ago [-]
You have to take into consideration that the default wallpaper is arguably the most seen picture in the entire world.
rob74 148 days ago [-]
Yup... but, if everyone thinks it's a rendering, and you could have saved tons of money by actually rendering it instead of doing what these guys did, it's still a waste of money if you ask me...
manuelmoreale 148 days ago [-]
That can be said for many other artistic creations. But if you ask me, the fact that it was so elaborate adds something to it. The end result might be the same but the intentions and the process to get there matter.
Also, waste of money. We’re talking Microsoft. It’s not like those money we’re going to be spent on charity. They paid some creative people to do creative work. We should appreciate that.
kefabean 148 days ago [-]
But it has the air of the banal. For something supposedly so creative it seems to totally lack....creativity. I suppose 100% in keeping with a tech company's vision for what a computer desktop should look like.
(That commercial literally had Honda execs complimenting the team on the quality of their CGI when they first saw it. Needless to say they were blown away when they found out it was real.)
alias_neo 148 days ago [-]
I knew what this was going to be before clicking it.
We had an Accord at one point when I was a kid, and Honda sent us (my dad) a DVD of this with some behind the scenes when it released.
I watched that DVD a hundred times, maybe more.
sanderjd 148 days ago [-]
That awesome! The funniest part is the end though, where the car is revealed and it's boring and kind of ugly. The commercial is way too good for that car :)
kuro_neko 148 days ago [-]
I think it's a little bit comfortable to think of a tech company as putting money into the arts.
jimbob45 148 days ago [-]
Sometimes these things land and sometimes they don’t. XP’s grassy hill seems to have been universally loved but could easily have been seen as lazy.
Granted, MS used to actually take theming seriously. XP had an excellent marketing campaign that tied in with the visual scheme of the product. Even the OS sounds tied in with the choice of music for their commercials, “Ray of Light” by Madonna.
Now we just get the wallpaper and there’s no concerted effort to make a theme of joy or accessibility or creativity or anything.
prmoustache 148 days ago [-]
It was lazy in the sense that photo had not been taken specifically for XP. It was a pro photographer seeing a nice thing to take a picture of with not specific project in mind, snapping it, then having it sold through a stock photo agency.
blackoil 148 days ago [-]
Am neither a photographer nor any vision expert. But, what's the point of having billions if to not spend on whimsies.
rjzzleep 148 days ago [-]
If only they had the same dedication to keep ads out of the core OS.
et-al 148 days ago [-]
Gmunk was working on visual graphics for the web back in late 90s / early 2000s with Vir2L.
If they wanted to, they could have easily banged out half a dozen wallpapers in an afternoon using Maya or whatever, but they chose the physical route.
vitaflo 148 days ago [-]
This is the hilarious part about the comments. Nobody knows who GMUNK is and it shows. Dudes been knocking it out of the park for decades.
JusticeJuice 148 days ago [-]
He's my all time fav digital artist, his infrared photography work is fantastic.
UberFly 148 days ago [-]
Yea, I appreciate their dedication but the end-product doesn't equal the effort when Jane in XBox 3d effects department probably could have done this during her lunch break.
omnimus 148 days ago [-]
For one still sure but they have made lots of movies from that set that were used for promotion. At some point this is a lot easier to get so much much material and quick variations.
bch 148 days ago [-]
May well be, but I’m reminded of Columbus’ Egg[0].
It's a really cool project, but the video presentation was just horrible to watch. All I really wanted was to see the fixture in plain form, but they tease you the whole time.
* Blasting loud music
* Saturated with bragging, useless testimonials
* Blurring-in was more common than actually seeing the work
* Cutting away from the work to a human too quickly
Maybe I'm coming off as miserable, but this video was totally unsatisfying to watch.
tmtvl 147 days ago [-]
When I was young we had a PC running Windows 3.1.1 (not the first computer I remember using, but the first one whose OS I remember the name of), and I recall it having this neat feature where you could draw an image in a tiny box and it would tile it across the screen as background image.
It probably wouldn't work so well for a "4k" monitor, but I thought it neat at the time.
usrbinbash 148 days ago [-]
That's a lot of effort for something god knows how many people change as pretty much the first thing after they first login to a new system.
dhosek 147 days ago [-]
Reminds me of someone once asking me how I got the hand-drawn pencil look to the type on an article in the typography magazine I published about the T-26 type foundry.
I drew it by hand with a pencil and scanned it.
I had another article headline where I commissioned an artist to carve the headline in stone and had it photographed for the printer.
entropie 148 days ago [-]
I have an vertical monitor (1080x1920) I use mainly for browsing and the site is basicially not readable: https://i.imgur.com/5Klt2Ls.png
I scrolled to the bottom for contact information but it keeps loading stuff so I never reach it.
criddell 148 days ago [-]
A useful keyboard shortcut is ctrl-end. You might have to hit it a couple of times, but it will get you to the bottom.
I’m on Windows, but I’m guessing macOS and many Linux DEs have something similar.
entropie 147 days ago [-]
Yeah I know, besides my keyboard has no physcial end/home key. But if websites do stuff like this, I usually hit Ctrl+w because my time is to precious to fight bad UIs.
geon 147 days ago [-]
I saw a photographer who mimicked the style of early 90s raytracing. Chrome spheres on checkerboards and such.
badrabbit 147 days ago [-]
It still doesn't measure up to xp's rolling hills or just about any macos default wallpaper. Nature is really pretty and hard to compete against. Small things like this say a lot about the overall product design philosophy in my opinion.
tdeck 148 days ago [-]
This reminds me of the famous photo from filming the Star Wars intro text:
Brilliant! Just today, I was listening to a panel of world class artists being asked (now trite) questions on AI taking over their jobs and they concluded something like:
"For mediocrity, turn to AI. If you want masters, call us".
The guy who did this also did some of the incredible work on Tron 2. I’m a big fan.
LoganDark 148 days ago [-]
Tron: Ares, the upcoming sequel to Tron: Legacy? Or a different Tron 2?
sneak 148 days ago [-]
No, I meant Tron: Legacy. The second Tron film. I didn’t know they were doing a third one.
LoganDark 148 days ago [-]
I've never seen someone call Tron: Legacy "Tron 2". TIL.
classified 147 days ago [-]
Seeing that they put that much attention to detail into a wallpaper, it seems petty to get hung up on the fact that their software is a shit show. So it's all forgiven.
I certainly can appreciate the artistry in building it and also I'm happy that the artists found joy in making it, but I can't help but wonder why MS bothered.
meisenhus 148 days ago [-]
As impressive as this looks (and is), the effort strikes me as monumentally oversized. This particular picture, with its straight lines and everything artificial, could have just as well come out of a renderer. For substantially less cost, the result would have been the same.
Doesn't mean you don't need to have the creative vision first. But executing it with a camera and a light/laser/fog set and all the effort that went into it, seriously, just take a talented vfx artist and you get the same result.
It's different with nature photography and especially with humans. But there was nothing natural with this image.
kuro_neko 148 days ago [-]
I'm reminded of the recent Steam Deck OLED video. It's obviously something that could be done with VFX, but I thought it was really cool.
I think this is similar. Just like in movies, there are directors who don't use VFX as much as they could...
dag11 148 days ago [-]
I work with the folks who built that! It truly was months of giddy passion on their part[1]. And it was such a joy to see in person.
Disclosure: I might not have worked on The Orb but I do work on Steam Deck and other projects at Valve.
That's like saying why should anyone at all make music, art, hire actors, etc., when A.I. will be able to do all of these tasks identically over the next couple years (partially already).
The human element is important. Because we're humans.
aniviacat 148 days ago [-]
Once AI is capable of delivering similar quality, many musicians and actors will indeed be replaced.
But until this technology exists, musicians and actors will continue being employed.
rizky05 148 days ago [-]
[dead]
pompino 148 days ago [-]
The final image is shaped by a variety of people observing live changes to the scene and giving inputs. You can't iterate as quickly when you're interrupted constantly by the artist having to modify the scene and then render it. I'm sure you would have made a nice looking image using a digital scene, but I don't think you can duplicate the experience. It would not have been the same creative atmosphere.
autoexec 148 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure it'd be far faster for a team of people to view various options on a screen while an artist moved virtual lights around and played with colors and lens flair effects in a computer than it would be to wait around while people set up and move around various lasers and projectors and smoke machines between attempts and then looked at a screen to see how the camera picked it up.
pompino 148 days ago [-]
No, it certainly isn't. Creating renders and scene modelling is definitely not real-time. Teams do markups and sketches for brainstorming.
148 days ago [-]
guitarlimeo 148 days ago [-]
But that's exactly what's interesting with this! Everything can't just be viewed through the lens of costs, the effort to make something unnatural like this in real life is part of the art itself.
If you're just looking at the end result, yeah, same result could've been achieved with VFX with a lot less costs, but it also wouldn't have as much value.
148 days ago [-]
hulitu 148 days ago [-]
> As impressive as this looks (and is), the effort strikes me as monumentally oversized
Like a lot of things in Windows (Taskbar, Settings): Measure with a micrometer, draw with a pencil, cut with an axe. /s
NietTim 148 days ago [-]
Never knew, always assumed it was just a render. Very cool!
ErigmolCt 147 days ago [-]
Same here. And I think it was the purpose to make peopel assume that
jononomo 147 days ago [-]
Wow, they must have spent $1 million to make that wallpaper but now you could do it in 15 seconds with ChatGPT.
giljabeab 148 days ago [-]
Shame they went a little overboard with the smoke and post fx really. A cleaner sharper image would have been nice
Krisando 148 days ago [-]
> Shame they went a little overboard with the smoke and post fx really. A cleaner sharper image would have been nice
I personally think the original is more interesting.
DonHopkins 148 days ago [-]
I love the way the smoke evokes Windows making your computer overheat, melt down, and burn up.
I can almost smell it immolating.
hhlh 148 days ago [-]
Your comment does not make any sense. Windows is not known for making people's computers overheat and melt.
1-6 148 days ago [-]
This wallpaper is definitely less appealing without the story to go with it behind the scenes.
147 days ago [-]
ErigmolCt 147 days ago [-]
It's remarkable to know the process behind this work of art truely
cynicalsecurity 148 days ago [-]
This rather speaks against Microsoft than for them. There was zero sense in creating a physical installation to capture it. The result feels digital and should have been digital. This speaks of Microsoft's poor planning and bad execution of plans and ideas.
Yes, they did, it's embedded in the article you're ostensibly commenting on.
jmprspret 148 days ago [-]
Gmunk is awesome
JoeyBananas 147 days ago [-]
It was tacky and horrible from day 1.
sschueller 148 days ago [-]
Very cool but I would prefer spending all that time and money on building a better product and what they delivered.
This is like a startup spending hours upon hours on logo and name instead of actually building something.
column 148 days ago [-]
This is such an ignorant take. The default wallpaper is seen by millions if not billions of people. Many never change it. It's an important part of the branding. The total cost of the shoot, including equipment, salaries, the studio, etc. is NOTHING to Microsoft and its marketing budget. It's not like they had to prioritize this over anything else, they are printing money left and right, they are a trillion dollar company and the default wallpaper is a key aspect of how people see their core product, Windows. It would be disastrous of them to ship with a sub-par wallpaper and in what world would the money "saved" would make a difference to "build a better product"?
UweSchmidt 148 days ago [-]
Does Microsoft have plenty of money to do anything? Sure. Does the trillion dollar company spend an appropriate effort on the product itself? Certainly not!
The issue is this: From Windows 10 and up, almost every interaction with the UI is a little bit broken, and I could fill pages just describing things that used to work just right in Windows 7 and earlier. It appears the Windows UI is now designed and approved by the visuals only. And now we learn about a disproportionate effort to create a visual.
So it's easy to see how a comment that points out this discrepancy, resonates with everyone who is halfway through their thousand daily cuts of UI punishment.
sschueller 148 days ago [-]
Have you used the Office365 Suite lately?
Scharkenberg 148 days ago [-]
Yes, it's still the best office suite in the market.
paradox460 148 days ago [-]
And yet the best wallpaper they ever used was a lucky fluke by the photographer, who was driving through Sonoma after a rainstorm, in a year where they had to burn the vines off a hillside due to blight infection.
148 days ago [-]
kra34 147 days ago [-]
should somebody tell them about ML models?
larodi 148 days ago [-]
So much for generative art in product design.
diego_sandoval 148 days ago [-]
Whenever I have to use Windows, I feel dirty, like Microsoft's filth is slowly contaminating my spirit through my interaction with the computer.
So, the last thing that I would want to set as a wallpaper would be a reminder of that fact that I'm using Windows.
Zecc 148 days ago [-]
I don't know about you, but more often than not I have maximized windows covering the background image. The thing which reminds me I'm using Windows is the start button. Not to mention.. everything else.
huygens6363 148 days ago [-]
I hate myself for saying it, but this feels like an artistic variation on "we spent 500 hours manually perfecting React button animations" or "I built a Lisp so we can have more interesting configuration files for our ... todo list app".
I guess I'm jaded.
> Creative Director: GMUNK
> Managing Director, Live Action: Oliver Fuselier
> Managing Partner, Digital: Dustin Callif
> Executive Producer: Robert Helphand
> Head of Production: Amy DeLossa
> Producer: Mary Church
> Associate Producer: John Stern
> Production Supervisor: Liz Welonek
> etc ...
I mean, come on.
cl3misch 148 days ago [-]
You're not wrong, but the production team might be more justified when you account for the huge number of users seeing this image.
Would a synthetic image sufficed? Yes. Can it be worth it to invest in artists creating something nice if millions of people see it? Yes.
huygens6363 148 days ago [-]
Bah. You're right. I'm being obtuse and need more coffee. Nerding out on things is fun, my whole life is based on it. I guess I feel some rivalry with the artistic world. Maybe it's jealousy.
autoexec 148 days ago [-]
It's kind of sad how often the best way for artists to get paid and have their work seen is by creating corporate advertising. At least in this case it's just a pretty logo and not a direct lie or manipulation.
omnimus 148 days ago [-]
Two main reasons to make it this way is to also generate movies for possible ads etc. And creative process - you get a lot more happy accidents and variety doing it this way over “draw anything” in photoshop which can be pretty daunting.
danieldk 148 days ago [-]
I don't know. I think a nice wallpaper can cheer up the day and make a system more lovely. Seems relevant when it reaches so many people.
However, I have never really liked this wallpaper (the few times I have seen it as a non-Windows user). The random desertscapes and dynamic wallpapers in macOS are really much more appealing.
puttycat 148 days ago [-]
The technical ingenuity is impressive.
I personally find this visual quite cold and soulless, compared to previous Windows wallpapers, mostly XP's of course.
For me this also coincided with Windows becoming completely useless and my moving to a Mac.
vsnf 148 days ago [-]
There was definitely a kind of warm, optimistic vibe that came with the Windows XP wallpaper. The whole UI language of the OS was similar too, with bubbly blues and greens everywhere. I suppose it captured a kind of positive cultural attitude towards computing.
userbinator 148 days ago [-]
I suppose it captured a kind of positive cultural attitude towards computing.
It was a time when MS was about giving users tools to do whatever they want, and not trying to coerce them down a path to be milked for $$$.
Yes but also it was the same exact time when MS dominated and stagnated. IE6 shipped with Windows XP
tavavex 148 days ago [-]
I think it was aimed at making the OS look less threatening and complicated to a new user. Then again, people did complain about it being a "Fisher-Price UI", so maybe this overwhelmingly positive perception is a result of people spending so much time with the OS and getting used to the way things were.
vsnf 148 days ago [-]
I do recall the Fisher-Price complaints. As I recall it mostly came from the Linux (or Linux-inclined) crowd. I never really understood the complaints, though it was common enough that I must have just been missing something. But really, I don't get whats wrong with a functional UI that's also friendly and inviting.
amatecha 148 days ago [-]
Just today I was thinking about XP and the phrase "Fisher-Price" came to mind. I liked XP's UI, even as whimsical and toy-like (and easy to make fun of) as it was. I'd prefer if computers and OSes retained the whimsy and character of that late-90's-early-2000's era of Win XP and the colourful iMacs, etc.
epolanski 148 days ago [-]
I feel the other way around.
Windows 10 with WSL, Power Toys and many other things sold me on windows for development.
I still use a MacBook on the move, but if I work from home I would never swap to OSX.
Way too many things annoy me: the filesystem, the file explorer, poor windows and multi monitor handling (to this date OSX sucks with 3 monitors and switches the output randomly when coming back from sleep/rebooting), the consistent issues with unlocking cameras/microphones, somewhat questionable support of non-Apple accessories (Bluetooth headset is an example), Docker support and there's some more.
Win11 with Ubuntu22 on WSL2 is all I need.
Rinzler89 148 days ago [-]
Same feeling from me. Windows 11 could be the perfect OS if they dropped the anti-user features and pestering, and make new features like Copilot and AI stuff opt-in instead of being forced down your throat by major updates.
Basically have Windows behave like Linux, where you get the bare minimum and the letting you choose what to add on top.
Shacklz 148 days ago [-]
> OSX sucks with 3 monitors and switches the output randomly when coming back from sleep/rebooting
This drives me nuts with my Mac at my workplace. It's mostly an awesome workhorse, but when I switched to Mac I was flabbergasted that this can be an issue.
The window-management I find also rather awful. When I asked the Mac-nerds I knew they all had their custom setup that includes some third-party-tooling, the built-in mission-control or whatever they call it didn't exactly receive favorable remarks...
tivert 148 days ago [-]
> I personally find this visual quite cold and soulless, compared to previous Windows wallpapers, mostly XP's of course. For me this also coincided with Windows becoming completely useless and my moving to a Mac.
Honestly, I kind of feel that's the contemporary style. My employer recently moved to a new office building, and feel exactly that way every time I have to go there.
It doesn't help that it's 100% hoteled seating, so there's no "lived in" vibe to counter the sterility.
148 days ago [-]
thefz 148 days ago [-]
Really? W10 is the best just after W7.
gizajob 148 days ago [-]
Windows 2000 was the platonic ideal Windows. Has been downhill since then.
qiqitori 148 days ago [-]
Yes, especially if you like ads in your start menu.
scotty79 148 days ago [-]
Start menu in W10 is terrible. Especially since they had wonderful menu in developer builds which I was using as my daily driver. But in the end they replaced it with this monstrosity.
ruszki 148 days ago [-]
I had no Windows edition since 98, which I didn't need to alter right after a fresh installation because of Microsoft bullshits. At least, it doesn't take a full day anymore to install and configure a fresh Windows.
thefz 148 days ago [-]
I don't have any.
resource_waste 148 days ago [-]
Try Linux/Fedora intead.
Windows is really awful, and Macs are super limited in hardware. (It might work if you only do web dev)
Fedora is literally better than both. People are just so used to repeating the linux prayer of 'debian/ubuntu/mint', that most people don't know: Debian is an outdated/old distro with limited features and lots of bugs.
Fedora is up-to-date, loaded with codecs and drivers, works with Nvidia, and has a 10/10 pro-consumer experience.
No ads, no harassment, smooth, fast, everything just works.
suby 148 days ago [-]
Fedora favors shifting the technological overton window over shipping working software. I first tried Fedora out on the initial release which switched on Wayland by default -- this was in like 2017, or around there. I installed it, booted to the login screen, and then logging in went to a black screen which booted me back to login. I was on an Nvidia card which was unsupported and I had no idea what Wayland was, so I ended up uninstalling it in favor of Linux Mint.
It's not like they weren't aware this wouldn't work for the majority of the desktop marketshare. They didn't try to mitigate this by detecting your card and defaulting to x11. They did not apparently care. Evidently causing friction and getting the ecosystem to switch was more important to them then my machine working with their software.
I'm sure Fedora is great, but I think it's poor form to recommend it to people new to Linux.
resource_waste 148 days ago [-]
The irony is that last year, Mint didn't have a recent kernel, so you couldn't use NVIDIA on Mint.
Not sure what to recommend then.
msoad 148 days ago [-]
I don’t want to be a fanboy but the wallpaper is so soulless and industrial. I like how Apple always tries to bring nature to computing with wallpapers and screensavers.
Also the Ariel videos of nature and cities for Apple TV and Mac is another example.
Windows feels so corporate and boring tbh
dogleash 148 days ago [-]
Apple has sterile attempts to pretend they're not sterile.
And that's fine. That's all it has to be. Something aesthetically appealing and universally brandsafe. But it's not not-soulless.
Have you ever read a F500 companies press release about a (re)branding or new logo or something? Where they retell the story the branding consultants told the executive suite about what the new image means and the vibe it embodies? But the end result is just bland nothingness that doesn't standout from the pack at all?
That's the energy in every Apple attempt to show personality. Hypercalculated and ultimately meaningless.
ggm 148 days ago [-]
"The apple wallpaper was physically built (by nature) and photographed."
amatecha 148 days ago [-]
Nice, so many good photos in that post! Thanks for sharing :D
gizajob 148 days ago [-]
Yeah I do kind of love the current dynamic "different every time" Mac OS wallpaper / splash screen. It's corporate Apple but still great, and infinitely better than MS's Borg-like contentless flatness.
oefrha 148 days ago [-]
The Windows login screen has been showing dynamic landscape photos for a loooong time. Of course, the part where you accidentally click on one of the search labels (?) and it opens Bing in Edge (previously IE), which is one of the three hundred ways you can accidentally open Edge/Bing in Windows, is not cool at all.
npteljes 148 days ago [-]
Windows can have Bing Wallpaper, which changes the wallpaper every day. It's not installed by default, but it's a fun offering from Microsoft.
TeMPOraL 148 days ago [-]
> I don’t want to be a fanboy but the wallpaper is so soulless and industrial. I like how Apple always tries to bring nature to computing with wallpapers and screensavers.
To each their own. I personally have more than enough nature around me; I prefer it to not also invade my computer.
resource_waste 148 days ago [-]
The emotions you used are classic of Apple's Victims.
At least you are aware you are a fanboy. Its the first step to freedom.
148 days ago [-]
rossant 148 days ago [-]
(2015)
dang 148 days ago [-]
Added above. Thanks!
hulitu 148 days ago [-]
> Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed
And then photoshopped. /s
You always need 2 programs in Windows to do a thing right. /s
foreverobama 148 days ago [-]
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auxfil 148 days ago [-]
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resuresu 146 days ago [-]
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asdiojadiosdijo 148 days ago [-]
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walteweiss 148 days ago [-]
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Takennickname 148 days ago [-]
You weren't attentive.
0xcoffee 148 days ago [-]
In Section 03 there is a video showing the physical setup.
walteweiss 148 days ago [-]
Thank you, I tend to ignore videos when on mobile. Checked it from my laptop.
Feels useless to me, to setup the whole physical thing for the sake of photo that could be just rendered. But to each their own.
throawayonthe 148 days ago [-]
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ecjhdnc2025 148 days ago [-]
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ninetyninenine 148 days ago [-]
Why do this when you can get an identical picture from photoshop?
fsloth 148 days ago [-]
If you can get kick-ass smoke and particles like that in Photoshop out-of-the-box please do tell me how.
ninetyninenine 147 days ago [-]
Typically you use photos. Photoshop does not come out of the box with photos.
JumpCrisscross 148 days ago [-]
> Why do this when you can get an identical picture from photoshop?
It gives it character and helps ensure you'll get good artists to work on it. Though now I wish they'd made that clear by making the intermediate shots desktop defaults.
I knew what a wanted — an old fashioned looking wall with old-timey pictures of my relatives hanging on the wall. I also wanted a mantel with more photos standing on it that would run along near the bottom of the book cover.
I tried initially creating the cover in a paint program — layering elements together (wallpaper, photo frames, photos), adding drop shadows, but it wasn't coming together.
So I went to Lowe's and bought a 4' x 8' sheet of 2" insulating foam or some such, bought what looked like the oldest-fashioned wall paper, a gallon of paint, etc. In the end I messed up the lighting, but I suppose that is something I am still learning in photography. But I still liked the result.
https://imgur.com/a/12VN4sI
My home studio doesn't have plain, unobstructed walls for some simple shots, and while a paper roll backdrop is a good substitute, sometimes you want a wall, or a corner, or you just want to use wallpaper.
So I built a massive construction with doubled-up cardboard sheet, girders made with pallet corners, these gigantic split pin things and hot glue, and then I spray-mounted wallpaper on it.
I also did it at the wrong time of year, when the air was still too damp and the heating needed to be on, so it didn't last an enormously long time before things rippled, because it turns out cardboard has some quite organic behaviours in moist air.
So it was almost a failure. But I'd absolutely do it again, replacing the cardboard with foamcore or thicker insulating board.
It was a really fascinating, liberating process to take that much control over the process, and I've been doing similar since, assembling my own photographic tools to a level that looks a bit like obsession.
I think maybe many software developers here don't understand the parallels between doing this sort of thing and assembling your "stack" for a few applications.
A true photographer's "tools" barely even start with the camera. There's a whole array of tools beyond that, beyond peripherals, that extend into the scene or into methodology.
Many people say this would've been easier with VFX, but I disagree. The image has highly convincing details that would take a long time even for highly talented VFX artists to nail. Instead, with a camera, you can let the world do the work for you. The studio setup is also very simple (cardboard + acrylic panel + projector + fog) and easy to experiment with. I'm pretty sure photography was the right tool for the project.
But the team making this image didn’t have it in advance. They just had some ideas they wanted to try out.
The story of how it was made is not just the story of the techniques they used, but also how they applied and adjusted those techniques to try things and see how it looked.
This image was “made” in that people built the stuff that was photographed, but it was also kind of “discovered” in that they tried a bunch of things until they discovered what they liked.
That’s possible in VFX too, but the process is different and too many iterations can quickly erase any cost advantage. This is one reason animated movies are disciplined about locking the script early in production. You can’t cost-effectively improv your way through an animated movie the way a director and actors can with a camera and a set.
But a side note on this:
> You can’t cost-effectively improv your way through an animated movie the way a director and actors can with a camera and a set.
The Jim Henson Company is working on exactly the technology that supports this, actually -- the business of live puppetry capture as distinct from, say, motion capture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbBdRHqGcQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDIlylZwLJE
This kit is expensive/bespoke but I don't know that it's _that_ expensive, set against how much money goes into making movies with large-scale bluescreen work these days. And it's wholly amenable to improv.
People have done simpler realtime rigs with off-the-shelf hardware and software in the past decade: see "The Dog Of Wisdom", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-UmfqFjpl0 which was made with Blender and a Leap Motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a_M9VsZ6Lk
And now we are completely drowning in VTubers, who use software like Live2d that analyzes a webcam image and uses it to control the motions of a pre-made 2D character. I've only ever seen it done to spice up the video of people streaming video games but I'm sure there's someone doing no-budget cartoons with it. There's also Adobe Character Animator, which has been used for various TV stuff like a live performance of Homer Simpson or a few low-budget shows.
And then there's VRChat; a few thousand dollars of head-mounted display/facial capture/body trackers and you can get realtime full-body tracking. There's probably someone fucking around with making movies this way too.
At this point I'm pretty sure that you could get most of the functionality of that hand-tooled puppetry gizmo by just taking a sock and gluing a couple of ping-pong balls onto it and tweaking some tracking software.
Reminds me of the Spaghetti Sorting algorithm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort
https://archive.org/details/armchairuniverse0000dewd_x2e7/
>> contact-and-removal operation takes constant time, the worst-case time complexity of the algorithm is O(n).
How is the contact-and-removal operation constant time? How can that assumption ever be true? If you use a parallel processor like human vision or human feel (ie. which pressure nerve activates on the hand) it may appear constant, but if you use a computer it would be n right (as you would need to check n slots). Wouldn't either defy O(n)?
The point is that reality itself is highly parallel
1. how fast your hand can reach for the next spaghetti piece - on average proportional to the radius of the pile of spaghetti, which is proportional to sqrt(n).
2. to actually notice the biggest piece, you need to again wait for a time proportional to sqrt(n) - light propagation is not instant.
So if we start thinking about this algorithm more like a computer scientist would (how fast it is as n grows to the infinity) it doesn't seem to be O(n) IMO.
The parameters of the scene need to be set up, yes, but then it would be just as easy to generate a few thousand frames from it. Also it's easier to version control for experimentation.
I did something similarish with water a long time ago, using a spectral renderer, finding spectral data for ocean water absorption and reflection, realistic spectral sun/sky model, and a physically-based ocean wave simulator to create the surface.
The underwater "caustic god rays" looked very nice and realistic, and setting it all up was easy once I had found the data. But it took ages to get rid of the noise.
Bad practical effects do exist, but even when bad they don’t look “unnatural”.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV-dDyYgwkc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZEpWvQFXqQ
Considering how much of current technology stems from geeks just proving that their crazy idea could work and looking for money for it afterwards, the disrespect here for another geek's craft and intuitions is wild.
Another thing is the fog rising up to create diffusion on the light. Even the best VFX in the world will only ever be an approximation to the real thing.
Budget aside, art isn't constrained or criticized by how much effort the artist put in.
All that matters is the result. A wallpaper or any other artistic creation isn't less beautiful or evocative because the artist spent thousands of hours on it.
Even without getting into semantics about "what is art", the reality is that this is promotional material for advertising. This wasn't commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMA.
This isn't to take away from the artists skill, effort, creativity etc. but the context of this is inherently a business and economic decision. There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is. It's a very typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase success or whatever.
They say, before making comments about what they think is art :-)
> There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
There is, as you state in your next couple of sentences:
> … monopolistic megacorp funded to show off … typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase
You can, probably rightly, call it a crappy impetus. But that was impetus for the exercise and could be called the artistic impetus. Even if you disagree strongly on that particular point, it is definitely a message.
To be slightly more fair, that wallpaper is a major part of the initial impression people have of the OS version, much like XP's Telly Tubby Hill did. The XP image was trying to convey “friendly, welcoming”, the Win10 one tries to convey something more like “dynamic, technically competent, flashy”. While it may not be an expression of someone's inner feelings or a societal property or anything like that, some art is more about directing your impression of something than it is about expressing someone else's and that is what this image was for and what it does.
99.9999% of all art is not commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMa. It's just something that artists do.
IT geeks are all for imposing their own creative restrictions on their work -- using Haskell when the competition is using PHP, developing their own distributed network persistence layer on top of SQLite when there are products out there that already exist but they just don't like for pseudospiritual reasons.
But artists who just make pictures are expected to be cost-effective and not to put any value on their artisanship?
> It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is.
Groan. It's not possible to have a serious discussions with someone starting from such a cynical position. After all, what is even the point of creating anything? We're all going to turn to dust and be forgotten forevermore.
The Win XP field was the opposite. It was organic, calming, and oddly fascinating because you couldn't tell if it was a plain photo or an edit or... what. And it had an unexpected reference to the Windows branding in the composition.
Win 10 was more like meaningless window-shaped visual noise.
Like it or not, art exists in a vacuum. It does not need to justify its existence. That's the very definition of art.
The proportions and composition are weird, messy, and obviously asymmetric in both axes. Both the horizontals and verticals are slightly off, which makes it feel unsettled.
It seems quite clumsily edited, with a blotchy cut-off at the left that feels claustrophobic and doesn't seem to be there for a good aesthetic reason.
IMO it would have been stronger and more powerful rotated left through 90 degrees so the light was shining down.
Disagree, HEAVILY, a ton of the biggest marvels in the world are so because of how much work was put into them.
When I saw this headline I mixed up windows versions and thought it was going to be about the Windows 11 Bloom backgrounds, which I always assumed were made with physical materials, but it seems like I am wrong about that one too, hah!
How do you let the "world" remove your greasy fingerprints from the glass?
blender: https://i.imgur.com/0BjMWi3.jpeg
original: https://i.imgur.com/GGwVibG.jpeg
blender (frame 0): https://i.imgur.com/XIV8Hma.png
original: https://i.imgur.com/GGwVibG.jpeg
Also, it includes a caveat:
> Unfortunately, due to the nature of volumetric rendering, I was unable to economically render the final animation at a high resolution with enough samples. So I had to resort to denoising, which sadly degraded the image quality and made it a bit flickery.
> Perhaps, with enough computing power, I'll be able to return to this project in the future and provide a cleaner final render.
Classic
Sure it could can/could be done but it would take a lot of time to get as good a result. Probably easier to just photograph it for real and photoshop a little bit.
The composite sounds like no picnic, either:
>With over 3,000 photos captured from the shoot, the initial stage of the composite was an exercise in patience as Munko diligently went through all of the assets and picked the best ones suited for the final image. He then dusted off his old 40 year-old designer fingers and brought them into Photoshop where he tirelessly combined exposures at a blistering 9k resolution.
He first build up the base image, which was obviously the foundation for the hero still, flushing out the core logo design with a variety of laser-infused illuminations.. These core layers were varied, ranging from minimal rim-lighting to a multitude of laser lines fanning through the central portions of the logo, lighting up the volumetric haze in a variety of artful ways. Compositing all these layers together was an extremely iterative process and was done in collaboration with Daddy Bear Art Director Ryan Vulk and Creative Director Christopher Ashworth, the two senior Directors on the Windows Brand Team.
Once the lovelies at the Windows team and up the ladder at Microsoft were happy with the aesthetics of the logo foundation, Munko then composited in the environmental passes, which consisted of separately shot layers of smoke and haze to create a very moody palette and accentuated the qualities of the practical approach.
The final touches were the lens flares, which were again shot as separate passes but were flaring the lens with a light source positioned in the same place as the laser projector, so the flares lined up perfectly with all the other passes. The final grade was applied to bring everything into the signature ‘Microsoft Blue’ palette, but still leaving a tonal range that kept everyone happy. The final 9k file was then sent to the magicians at XYZ Creative Production Agency, who specialize in high-end photo retouching and did the final optimizations on the hero image.
https://youtube.com/@workphlo
Capture One (the kinda sorta still industry standard tethering/photography capture software in the marketing industry, for all the high-end kit) has a really nice tool to help with previsualising compositing live.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(image)
> With Bliss, Microsoft went a step further than merely licensing it: they bought the full rights to the image meaning no company would ever be able to license the photo from Corbis again, as the image was often used as part of XP's marketing and the Luna theme is modelled around its color scheme. It was purchased for an undisclosed amount of money in the low six figures; O'Rear cannot reveal the exact amount without violating a non disclosure agreement. He did not receive the full cost as Corbis handled the sale. As a result of its Microsoft acquisition, it was permanently removed from Corbis' website and has never been available on Getty Images or other sites that Corbis cross-licensed photos to. The vertical shot was also included in the acquisition, as O'Rear cannot release it due to his agreement with Microsoft.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/02/autumn200702
https://www.google.com/maps/place//@43.4246699,-79.9457692,1...
> Q: How did you come to compose "The Microsoft Sound"?
> A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem -- solve it."
https://www.sfgate.com/music/popquiz/article/q-and-a-with-br...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIfbdi41ho
This bit has always stuck in my head. Makes his longnow foundation work make more sense. Always find it wild that microsoft takes the time and spends the money on such tiny details in their products.
It somehow captures my soul, perhaps because i was very young when i saw it
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers/comments/bicyok/backgrou...
I'd call it an artifact of only having 16 colours to work with when SETUP boots. Obviously, most machines at the time had more to work with than that, but VGA - which is to say, 16 colors at 640x480 - was the baseline. And remember that Windows 95 could be installed from _floppies_; looking fancy is good, but you don't want to gratuitously use disk space. No multiple versions of the same image for you!
Let's take this fancy "Mac with some other random shit on a desk" image from Unsplash:
https://unsplash.com/photos/black-and-white-self-balancing-b...
Here's what it looks like with various ways of reducing it to 16 colours:
https://imgz.org/iC7KufjC.jpg
(I know, the images are small on a modern display! Each square is full-size, because we're VGA.)
Top left is the original, obviously. Top right is what happens if you just reduce it to 16 colours; it looks like nothing in particular, and it weighs in at 153K (exported in a modern graphics editor), or more than a tenth of a 3.5" floppy disk. Bottom left is what happens if you do it with dithering; you can make it look like you have more colours than you actually do, but it also weighs 153K.
And bottom right is SETUP.BMP. It only uses _two_ colours from the palette ("0, 0, 255" blue and black). That's 1-bit colour which means my SETUP.BMP when exported to an actual BMP only takes up 38.5 kilobytes.
So the answer to your question, I suppose, is "use as few colours as possible and don't waste disk space" or "dithering" or "the 90s", but often the technical limitations of a period plus time become an aesthetic.
That's the Microsoft I am used to ^^
Anyway, since it transcodes the WP into a JPEG, it has the ability to select a compression ratio. That ratio is pretty famously < 100% and as a result there's some degenerate cases where a wallpaper that looks good when viewed in the filesystem looks terrible when set to the background.
https://superuser.com/questions/1377883/how-to-prevent-wallp...
Microsoft got Windows where it is by having no sense of self-respect and willing to play the B2B race to the bottom. And it remains dominant thanks to decades' worth of legacy software that needs to continue running.
So that's cheapness and momentum.
If Windows was ever a beautiful product, it certainly isn't now. It would never become popular today in its current shape and principles.
Anyone can say that about any product. That doesn't make it true. Windows is a successful product that satisfies a need that people and businesses have. You can't fake dollar bills.
>Microsoft got Windows where it is by having no sense of self-respect and willing to play the B2B race to the bottom. And it remains dominant thanks to decades' worth of legacy software that needs to continue running.
>So that's cheapness and momentum.
>If Windows was ever a beautiful product, it certainly isn't now. It would never become popular today in its current shape and principles.
I'd rather sell a hundred million copies than convince some randos on the internet that my software is "beautiful".
Can you source this statement?
https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Windows_10
It does seem that the original was replaced in May 2019 by a brighter version, although whether it was drawn on a computer or not is anyone's guess.
> GMUNK was also involved in this version, and stated that it was created under the same methodology as the previous version.
https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Hero#Later_versio...
A lot of the promotional material highlights the sets, costumes and props from films on display, and they are certainly interesting, but far more interesting to me are the two floors of cinematic miniatures--diorama after diorama of physically-built miniature sets used as "virtual backgrounds" before they were mostly generated using CGI art (which I do appreciate). They are remarkable and remarkably interesting as pieces of art as well as cinema history. This story reminded me of this--sometimes the effect you want needs a tactile realism that is hard to replicate digitally, and is rarely as neat and toy-like.
What does "live-action shoot" mean in this statement? Wouldn't this just be "still photography"? When I think of live action, I think of people or at least ... action?
Although I like the 'amateuristic' style of the old Tux, I must say this new minimal penguin looks really good.
https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=299&ord=latest
[1] https://mspoweruser.com/new-default-windows-10-light-theme-w...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_News_for_People_Who_Love_...
It's a weird feeling. Kinda like letting go of the desktop-oriented computer in favor of window-manager-oriented. There's beauty in the former, and simplicity and elegance in the latter.
And later in life i switched to total black with dark mode for all my devices (and my eyes thanked me for it :)
My only other though is that I'm surprised this many people were needed to take that photo.
Also, waste of money. We’re talking Microsoft. It’s not like those money we’re going to be spent on charity. They paid some creative people to do creative work. We should appreciate that.
(That commercial literally had Honda execs complimenting the team on the quality of their CGI when they first saw it. Needless to say they were blown away when they found out it was real.)
We had an Accord at one point when I was a kid, and Honda sent us (my dad) a DVD of this with some behind the scenes when it released.
I watched that DVD a hundred times, maybe more.
Granted, MS used to actually take theming seriously. XP had an excellent marketing campaign that tied in with the visual scheme of the product. Even the OS sounds tied in with the choice of music for their commercials, “Ray of Light” by Madonna.
Now we just get the wallpaper and there’s no concerted effort to make a theme of joy or accessibility or creativity or anything.
If they wanted to, they could have easily banged out half a dozen wallpapers in an afternoon using Maya or whatever, but they chose the physical route.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
* Blasting loud music * Saturated with bragging, useless testimonials * Blurring-in was more common than actually seeing the work * Cutting away from the work to a human too quickly
Maybe I'm coming off as miserable, but this video was totally unsatisfying to watch.
It probably wouldn't work so well for a "4k" monitor, but I thought it neat at the time.
I drew it by hand with a pencil and scanned it.
I had another article headline where I commissioned an artist to carve the headline in stone and had it photographed for the printer.
I scrolled to the bottom for contact information but it keeps loading stuff so I never reach it.
I’m on Windows, but I’m guessing macOS and many Linux DEs have something similar.
https://www.metaflix.com/behind-the-scenes-of-star-wars-open...
"For mediocrity, turn to AI. If you want masters, call us".
Doesn't mean you don't need to have the creative vision first. But executing it with a camera and a light/laser/fog set and all the effort that went into it, seriously, just take a talented vfx artist and you get the same result.
It's different with nature photography and especially with humans. But there was nothing natural with this image.
I think this is similar. Just like in movies, there are directors who don't use VFX as much as they could...
Disclosure: I might not have worked on The Orb but I do work on Steam Deck and other projects at Valve.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/41180511...
The human element is important. Because we're humans.
But until this technology exists, musicians and actors will continue being employed.
If you're just looking at the end result, yeah, same result could've been achieved with VFX with a lot less costs, but it also wouldn't have as much value.
Like a lot of things in Windows (Taskbar, Settings): Measure with a micrometer, draw with a pencil, cut with an axe. /s
Microsoft replaced it in 2019 with this one:
https://static.miraheze.org/windowswallpaperwiki/9/99/Img0_%...
I personally think the original is more interesting.
I can almost smell it immolating.
This is like a startup spending hours upon hours on logo and name instead of actually building something.
The issue is this: From Windows 10 and up, almost every interaction with the UI is a little bit broken, and I could fill pages just describing things that used to work just right in Windows 7 and earlier. It appears the Windows UI is now designed and approved by the visuals only. And now we learn about a disproportionate effort to create a visual.
So it's easy to see how a comment that points out this discrepancy, resonates with everyone who is halfway through their thousand daily cuts of UI punishment.
So, the last thing that I would want to set as a wallpaper would be a reminder of that fact that I'm using Windows.
I guess I'm jaded.
> Creative Director: GMUNK
> Managing Director, Live Action: Oliver Fuselier
> Managing Partner, Digital: Dustin Callif
> Executive Producer: Robert Helphand
> Head of Production: Amy DeLossa
> Producer: Mary Church
> Associate Producer: John Stern
> Production Supervisor: Liz Welonek
> etc ...
I mean, come on.
Would a synthetic image sufficed? Yes. Can it be worth it to invest in artists creating something nice if millions of people see it? Yes.
However, I have never really liked this wallpaper (the few times I have seen it as a non-Windows user). The random desertscapes and dynamic wallpapers in macOS are really much more appealing.
I personally find this visual quite cold and soulless, compared to previous Windows wallpapers, mostly XP's of course. For me this also coincided with Windows becoming completely useless and my moving to a Mac.
It was a time when MS was about giving users tools to do whatever they want, and not trying to coerce them down a path to be milked for $$$.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34021851
Windows 10 with WSL, Power Toys and many other things sold me on windows for development.
I still use a MacBook on the move, but if I work from home I would never swap to OSX.
Way too many things annoy me: the filesystem, the file explorer, poor windows and multi monitor handling (to this date OSX sucks with 3 monitors and switches the output randomly when coming back from sleep/rebooting), the consistent issues with unlocking cameras/microphones, somewhat questionable support of non-Apple accessories (Bluetooth headset is an example), Docker support and there's some more.
Win11 with Ubuntu22 on WSL2 is all I need.
Basically have Windows behave like Linux, where you get the bare minimum and the letting you choose what to add on top.
This drives me nuts with my Mac at my workplace. It's mostly an awesome workhorse, but when I switched to Mac I was flabbergasted that this can be an issue.
The window-management I find also rather awful. When I asked the Mac-nerds I knew they all had their custom setup that includes some third-party-tooling, the built-in mission-control or whatever they call it didn't exactly receive favorable remarks...
Honestly, I kind of feel that's the contemporary style. My employer recently moved to a new office building, and feel exactly that way every time I have to go there.
It doesn't help that it's 100% hoteled seating, so there's no "lived in" vibe to counter the sterility.
Windows is really awful, and Macs are super limited in hardware. (It might work if you only do web dev)
Fedora is literally better than both. People are just so used to repeating the linux prayer of 'debian/ubuntu/mint', that most people don't know: Debian is an outdated/old distro with limited features and lots of bugs.
Fedora is up-to-date, loaded with codecs and drivers, works with Nvidia, and has a 10/10 pro-consumer experience.
No ads, no harassment, smooth, fast, everything just works.
It's not like they weren't aware this wouldn't work for the majority of the desktop marketshare. They didn't try to mitigate this by detecting your card and defaulting to x11. They did not apparently care. Evidently causing friction and getting the ecosystem to switch was more important to them then my machine working with their software.
I'm sure Fedora is great, but I think it's poor form to recommend it to people new to Linux.
Not sure what to recommend then.
For example
https://iso.500px.com/iphone-6-milky-way-wallpaper-interview...
Also the Ariel videos of nature and cities for Apple TV and Mac is another example.
Windows feels so corporate and boring tbh
And that's fine. That's all it has to be. Something aesthetically appealing and universally brandsafe. But it's not not-soulless.
Have you ever read a F500 companies press release about a (re)branding or new logo or something? Where they retell the story the branding consultants told the executive suite about what the new image means and the vibe it embodies? But the end result is just bland nothingness that doesn't standout from the pack at all?
That's the energy in every Apple attempt to show personality. Hypercalculated and ultimately meaningless.
To each their own. I personally have more than enough nature around me; I prefer it to not also invade my computer.
At least you are aware you are a fanboy. Its the first step to freedom.
And then photoshopped. /s
You always need 2 programs in Windows to do a thing right. /s
Feels useless to me, to setup the whole physical thing for the sake of photo that could be just rendered. But to each their own.
It gives it character and helps ensure you'll get good artists to work on it. Though now I wish they'd made that clear by making the intermediate shots desktop defaults.