GoKawiil
Tech News
The Public Domain Review, a nonprofit publication, has shared a collection of historical photographs depicting elaborate sand sculptures created on the beaches of Atlantic City between roughly 1880 and 1920. The images document a once-popular seaside art form that flourished during that era. Alongside the feature, the outlet appealed to readers for donations, noting it operates without ads or paywalls.
A developer inspired by Jonty Hurwitz's anamorphic sculptures built a custom application that arranges arbitrary 3D meshes—like cars, pigs, and pigeons—so their combined silhouette forms a target image when viewed from one specific camera angle. The system starts with randomly placed objects and uses gradient descent with a differentiable renderer to iteratively adjust each mesh's position, size, and rotation until the projected outline matches the target picture.
A mathematically crafted sculpture highlights a special set of dice built so that rolling them against each other never results in a tie. Unlike standard six-sided dice, which carry a 1-in-6 chance of matching results, these 60-sided dice are engineered around number theory principles to guarantee a distinct winner every time.