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  • The Laughing Man Mac App

    • 27 Sep 2011
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    Recently my friend Kunal and I were talking about augmented reality apps, and I mentioned the potential awesomeness that would be a Mac app that used facial recognition and tracking to put the iconic "Laughing Man" logo from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex onto someone's face via the built-in iSight.

    Sure enough, in typical Kunal coding fashion and as a fan of the show, he went out and actually made the app. You can read more about the project here. The app is still under development, and hopefully soon enough you'll all be able to have your own Ghost in the Shell moment.

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  • The Origin of the Laughing Man Logo

    • 22 May 2008
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    Lrg_sac_laughing_man_2-cropped
    My favorite anime of all time is Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This cyberpunk show combines futurist philosophy with non-stop action and thought-provoking story-lines to create an immersive and compelling world.  It deals with the notion of the "stand alone complex"; the idea that the internet enables such a deep level of interconnectivity that it gives rise to a collective subconscious that exists on the net and manifests itself in the thoughts and actions of those wired into the web.  I wrote about this theory in this post.

    The first season's story arc dealt with "The Laughing Man", a cyber criminal who inspires a slew of copycat crimes.  The hacker is capable of inserting his logo into people's minds so that the victim sees the image superimposed onto the real world.  This logo becomes a dominant visual theme, and has even bled out of the show into the real world.

    What I didn't know into more recently was that the logo was not crafted by the show's staff, but instead by british designer, TERRATAG.  He was doing work for Frognation, a Japanese game developer and record label.  He had sent over a bunch of stickers, and it happened that an employee at Frognation was also working on the production of the first season of the show.  The director of the series, Kenji Kamiyama, saw the stickers, and sought out TERRATAG to create the design.  You can read an interview with him about how he wound up involved with the production here.  Also, you can find some great merchandise from TERRATAG here.  Finally, If you want to bring the "Laughing Man" into the real world, pick up some stickers and put them over all of the faces of people in your photographs.

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    8BitKid.com is a site featuring nerd news for your inner geek. It covers anime, gaming, and gadgets, and is brought to you by Max Engel.

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