Goodbye Tokyo!

It's Friday lunchtime, and I will go back to Germany on Tuesday. My last weekend in Tokyo is about to start! 2 days ago, I had my goodbye party - it was great fun! See the flyer below :-)



My future is still unclear... I do not know where and what I will be working 2 months later...

Sayonara Tokyo - it was complicated/interesting/rewarding/frustrating/challenging to stay here!

2 months before leaving japan

i have decided to leave japan. the reasons for that are quite complicated...

anyways, i have 2 months left before i return to germany.
of these 2 months, i will spend 2 weeks in australia, and 1 week i will attend ISMAR in Nara, Japan.

Currently, my main activity is still job hunting.

My main side activity is enjoying Japan while I am still here...
Today, there is a huge beach party near my house. fortunately, the weather is great today (it was a little rainy recently).
The party has started already!! However, I have to wait for the post (they come to my home to pick up boxes that I ship to germany..). I can't wait to go to the beach now!

Australia

I will go to Australia: 10/18 - 11/1. I am looking very forward to it!! First, the university seems to be really cool: they get me flight tickets, free accommodation. Furthermore, I get picked up from the airport with a limo!! Wow... Second, the lab that I am applying for is doing really fun stuff. I can't wait to try their demos: Hand of god and AR Quake.

Third: Australia seems to be a fantastic country! I have gotten myself a Lonely Planet. The more I read about Australia, the more interesting it gets for me :-) I hope that I find time to climb Ayers Rock while I am there...

Web discoveries

Recently, I have quite a lot of free time. Also, the weather was rainy; thus, I had plenty of time to browse the net. Here are two cute things that I have found:

A sad robot's love story:


read the full cartoon here.

A graphical comparison of China and Germany:


The above image shows the the German (blue) and the Chinese (red) perception of opinions. The Chinese designer Liu Yang has created lots of these comparisons. Please enjoy them here: 1, 2, 3. Interesting for me was that in almost all of his comparisons, the Chinese view and the Japanese view are identical! However, in one of them, the Japanese act exactly like the Germans!! It's the one about queuing up:

job search & iconograph

currently, my main focus is my job search. maybe, i have found a good option! it is in australia ... :-) very soon, i will go there for 2 weeks to check out the location! i am sure that i will blog from there - stay tuned!

apart from that, i am catching up on some things that i wanted to do for a long time. for example, i am learning a little computer vision now. One very surprising thing is (at least for me) that a 3D model can be reconstructed from a single photo or painting. check out this example, which shows a fly-through of vermeer's music lesson - impressive!

This research was even used to refute the hockney-falco hypothesis. Briefly, this hypothesis states that renaissance painters had used optical aids to achieve photorealistic paintings. Very similar to the way an iconograph works in discworld (see image below).
The wikipedia article about this dispute is very interesting! (also check out the external links at the bottom of that page).