Smartphones can now record respectable-quality high-definition video, so standalone video cameras can no longer rely on image quality alone to draw in punters. JVC's catchingly-named GZ-VX715 Everio video camera is not only designed to work with smartphones, but can connect to Wifi networks itself for uses unheard of in other consumer video cameras.

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What's the best way to measure the scale of the internet?

Youtube, one of the most popular sites on the web, has announced that it now sees one hour of video uploaded to its servers every second. Every day, these videos receive five billion views.

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The old-fashioned red and blue 'anaglyph' glasses pictured above are probably, still, what many people think of when they think about 3D movies.

Despite new technology (the far superior polarised-lens glasses) and huge investment, 3D still hasn't quite caught the public's imagination, much to the chagrin of the companies spending enormous amounts of money promoting it.

On the show floors at the Computex trade show in Taipei, 3D is doing a roaring trade. There are 3D products everywhere, from all sorts of manufacturers. One of them, Master Image 3D of Hollywood, was hard at work today convincing the Computex Innovation Forum that 3D was indeed the way forward. 

Master Image's British boss, Roy Taylor (executive vice president and general manager of 3D display) told the forum that recent reports of falling audiences for 3D cinema releases were selectively picking films that had failed and ignoring ones that had been successful, such as Marvel Comics/Paramount's Thor, which took $66 million in its opening weekend, 60 per cent of which was accounted for by 3D ticket sales. Mr Taylor said: "Just because one 3D movie is not a huge success, that doesn't mean there's an issue with 3D. It probably means there's an issue with the movie."

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The Grant Museum, part of University College London's zoology department, used to be one of my favourite museums in the city.

Part of its charm, apart from the skeleton quagga that used to be a zebra (the museum's other zebra turned out to be a donkey), and the various things in jars, was that in order to get to it you had to go down into a rather dingy basement, past lecturers' office doors.

But charm aside, that arrangement wasn't conducive to increasing visitor numbers, so the Grant has moved. It took them nearly nine months but some of the staff have documented the process online.

Image copyright UCL, Grant Museum/Matt Clayton. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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We're always on the look-out for fun and creative projects you can do with a home PC, and in issue 346 of the magazine, published on 26 May, we're going to show you how to create your own stop-motion animations.

A full list of what you will need to create your own short animations, with detailed instructions, will appear in the article. But we thought we'd give you a preview of the video that we commissioned - under the creative direction of our freelance colleague, Sarah Dobbs - to whet your apetite.

If you have done this type of work before, we'd love to hear from you so we can share your tips with other Computeractive readers.

 

The Unicode character set is one of the great unsung heroes of computer technology, allowing people around the world to use computers in their own languages. 

Because modern computers were developed by English-speakers, for a long time computers were Anglophone-centric, using the limited Ascii character set (which is why you sometimes see strange characters on websites where non-Ascii accents - é - or signs - ` - have been used). Unicode fixes that by allowing several language sets inside a single font.

Artist Jörg Piringer has made a video of it - each character in the set is displayed, one frame at a time.

There are 65,535 available characters, of which 49,571 are used, so the whole video is around half an hour long. It may sound boring, but with the soundtrack (of which more after the jump) it's strangely hypnotic:

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