FIlm buffs thinking back on the history of digital effects will probably bring up 80s classics like Tron or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which featured cinema's first entirely computer-generated sequence, courtesy of ILM. But if you want to get picky, the use of digital effects in film goes back further than that. All the way to 1973, in fact. Today's CG space battles and green screens galore owe it all to Westworld, written and directed by Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton.

The New Yorker has a fun profile on Westworld's effects, which were, of course, archaic by today's standards. The film was shot on a skimpy $1.25 million budget--small money, even at the time--and only a couple minutes of the film required digital effects. Westworld is set in a sci-fi resort, where visitors can spend $1000 a day to hang out in Medieval World, Roman World, and Westworld, which recreate classic time periods with robots serving as stand-ins for real people. Before the Star Trek holodeck came around, this was sci-fi's best take on recreating a paradise version of the past.

Things go wrong, of course--the robots go haywire, and cowboy Yul Brenner hunts star James Brolin across the resort. He is, in every respect, the proto-Terminator--including his "computer" vision, which is muddy and pixelated. Enter the first digital effect.

Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic wasn't around to whip up snazzy digital effects yet, so "Crichton got a quote for generating the computer imagery from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena," writes The New Yorker. "He was told that the two minutes of footage would cost two hundred thousand dollars and require nine months—both prohibitive. He turned to a maker of abstract films, John Whitney, Sr., famed in art and film circles for his work creating animation with military-surplus analog electronics and motor assemblies. Whitney referred Crichton to his son, John Whitney, Jr., who was eager to follow in his father’s footsteps as an experimental filmmaker, but using computers. He agreed to do the effects in four months for twenty thousand dollars."

Whitney's idea was to divide the film into squares and calculate the average color in each one, blurring them together into what we would now immediately call a pixelated look. But there was another problem: scanning the film back then was no easy task. Whitney found a company that could help him, and spent two months testing out how to play with color and contrast to make the effect work projected on a screen.

The New Yorker writes: "Because Whitney didn’t have a color scanner, the workload was tripled: M.G.M.’s optical department made color separations of the film—one set of black-and-white footage for each of the three primary colors—that he needed to process separately, image by image. The computer processing itself took about eight hours per ten-second sequence."

The Google Maps update announced at this week's Google I/O Conference integrates the satellite view of Google Earth. It's 3D! It looks great! Of course, if you look closely, Google Maps' images will still have plenty of imperfections. At the street view level, photos are often blurry or awkwardly stitched together. That's the price we pay for total coverage, and the good news is that quality is constantly improving.

Making smarter maps, with more usable data, is Google's primary goal. The mission of another mapping service, named MapBox, is something very different. MapBox wants to make their maps gorgeous. The best looking on the web. And they're doing a pretty damn good job.

Image credit: Mapbox

Wired recently wrote a behind-the-scenes look at MapBox, a small team of about 30 using open mapping data to build a prettier, if not better, map. Their service is currently used on Foursquare and Evernote, and they've had other partners in the past. While MapBox isn't as big as Google Maps or Nokia Maps, they're gaining a foothold, and their use of totally open data allows for a lot of flexibility. The best part of the story is how they're getting that data, and what they're doing with it, which is where MapBox really differs from Google Maps.

MapBox's satellite imagery comes from NASA's LANCE-MODIS system, which is public domain. Here's challenge one, as Wired explains:

“ 'For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012,' says [MapBox's Charlie] Loyd, 'this amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.'

"The first problem is even getting the data. It’s all available in the public domain, but just transferring it over to MapBox’s servers was a major task because of the volume. To do this render, they needed to download two thirds of a terabyte of compressed data. 'We’ve got 30 to 40 servers pulling down data from NASA,' says [data analyst] Herwig. 'We called them up and said, ‘hey we’re going to hit you hard, what’s the best way we can do it for you?' "

Dealing with a mere five billion pixels sounds like a huge challenge, but of course that's nothing new to companies that have mapped the entire Earth. Typically, the satellite imagery would be scanned, and the brightest, least-cloudy images would be chosen because they give the clearest view of a region. There's an obvious issue with this technique: images won't match up. Two locations side-by-side could be represented by photographs taken months or seasons apart.

MapBox wants a seamless, beautiful map. That takes a different approach.

Found footage movies are in the zeitgeist again, even though many thought it was a one trick idea with The Blair Witch Project. But the enormous cost to profit margins of the Paranormal Activity movies launched the trend again, and it crossed over to other genres as well, like the comedy Project X, and the superhero movie Chronicle.

Whether it’s a horror story or a comedy, the idea is simple. An event happens, it’s been documented on video, and once the footage is found and watched, it tells the story of the event. The idea of a found footage movies seems so simple, you’d think anyone could do it. In fact, that’s been the appeal for many filmmakers: it’s a simpler, and much cheaper, way to make a movie.

Some feel that Blair Witch had a punk, DIY sensibility that proved to young directors they didn’t need a lot of fancy, schmantzy equipment to make a movie. As Josh Leonard, who starred in the film, told the L.A. Times, “It was like when you and your buddies were 14 and you heard a Germs album and you’re like, ‘I could do that.’”

Paramount has a number of found footage projects in development, and as the President of the studio, Adam Goodman, told Deadline, “I believe it’s something that’s here to say. It’s a terrific medium for filmmakers. They don’t see the medium as a barrier to entry. They don’t care about shaky cameras. For whatever reason, it just makes for a much more visceral experience for the audience.”

At least one horror director complained to me that doing a found footage movie makes directors lazy, but in several found footage horror films it took a lot of work to make it look like no work went into it at all. Since the late sixties, documentary techniques and cinema verite became a big part of making horror films effective.

Night of the Living Dead may have been the first in this regard with its frantic camerawork, and fake newsreel footage that helped make the event seem more plausible. And as Dan O’Bannon, the late screenwriter of Alien, said of horror films that were shot on a budget, the lack of professional polish makes them feel far more removed from Hollywood. Like demented home movies, you have the feeling the people behind the camera aren’t bound by any restraints and could show you anything.

Blair Witch was shot on Hi-8, which is essentially a step above VHS, and it definitely gave it that demented home movie feel, but it was actually a European horror flick shot on 16mm that first started the found footage concept, namely 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust.

Back in 2011, we wrote about why you should and shouldn't be excited for quantum computers, extremely complex computers that can handle algorithms traditional transistor-based computers aren't capable of. Here's another reason to be excited for quantum computing: Google and NASA have partnered up to run a laboratory studying artificial intelligence that will use a quantum computer.

"The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, as the entity is called, will focus on machine learning, which is the way computers take note of patterns of information to improve their output," writes The New York Times. "Personalized Internet search and predictions of traffic congestion based on GPS data are examples of machine learning. The field is particularly important for things like facial or voice recognition, biological behavior, or the management of very large and complex systems."

Photo credit: D-Wave

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will open in the fall of this year with a quantum computer from D-Wave. Commercial quantum computing is a brand new field--D-Wave just sold its first quantum computer to Lockheed this year--and we could see some amazing results from quantum computing power in the next few years.

Tests last year found that a D-Wave quantum computer was 3600 times faster than a supercomputer. What does that mean, exactly? The Times does a good job of breaking down why quantum computers are so effective: