Trippy Kaleidoscopic Collages Made From Your Favorite Comic Book Heroes

German designer Eduard Horn has created a series of images called Kaleidocomix that reimagine his childhood comic book heroes as trippy collection of of geometric patterns.. Eduard Horn

German designer Eduard Horn has created a series of images called Kaleidocomix that reimagine his childhood comic book heroes as trippy collection of of geometric patterns..

Eduard Horn

Whether it's Batman, Spiderman, or a superannuated superhero like Vampirella, his focus is was entirely on the formal elements of the character's design and costume. Eduard Horn

Whether it's Batman, Spiderman, or a superannuated superhero like Vampirella, his focus is was entirely on the formal elements of the character's design and costume.

Eduard Horn

"It wasn't really about certain heroes per se," he says. Eduard Horn

"It wasn't really about certain heroes per se," he says.

Eduard Horn

Comics are known for featuring over-the-top tales of derring-do, but Horn's preference is for his more understated creations.

Comics are known for featuring over-the-top tales of derring-do, but Horn's preference is for his more understated creations.

Horn found that symmetrical images worked better than asymmetrical ones Eduard Horn

Horn found that symmetrical images worked better than asymmetrical ones

Eduard Horn

"I do really like the compositions that involve typography a lot," he says. "And also the more abstract ones that give you little clue that it might have something to do with comic books." Eduard Horn

"I do really like the compositions that involve typography a lot," he says. "And also the more abstract ones that give you little clue that it might have something to do with comic books."

Eduard Horn

Horn likens the images to of church windows with their bold colors and hints of heroic figures, Eduard Horn

Horn likens the images to of church windows with their bold colors and hints of heroic figures,

Eduard Horn

the abstract, geometric nature of many of the designs would feel at home inside a mosque as well Eduard Horn

the abstract, geometric nature of many of the designs would feel at home inside a mosque as well

Eduard Horn

The comics are modified using Adobe AfterEffects, tweaking the characters and colors with an array of nine mirroring options that transform the image of the hero or ne'er-do-well into a mass of multi-color geometry. Eduard Horn

The comics are modified using Adobe AfterEffects, tweaking the characters and colors with an array of nine mirroring options that transform the image of the hero or ne'er-do-well into a mass of multi-color geometry.

Eduard Horn

Whether it's Batman, Spiderman, or a superannuated superhero like Vampirella, his focus is was entirely on the formal elements of the character's design and costume. Eduard Horn

Whether it's Batman, Spiderman, or a superannuated superhero like Vampirella, his focus is was entirely on the formal elements of the character's design and costume.

Eduard Horn

Like a mad scientist, Horn plans to continue experimenting with comic kaleidoscopes, either through the use of moving images, or perhaps, building a physical device. Eduard Horn

Like a mad scientist, Horn plans to continue experimenting with comic kaleidoscopes, either through the use of moving images, or perhaps, building a physical device.

Eduard Horn

"I think it could be nice to experiment with some animated versions of the KaleidoComix images," says Horn. "I think it might look quite psychedelic and hypnotic at the same time." Eduard Horn

"I think it could be nice to experiment with some animated versions of the KaleidoComix images," says Horn. "I think it might look quite psychedelic and hypnotic at the same time."

Eduard Horn

The Justice League of America Eduard Horn

The Justice League of America

Eduard Horn

Martian Manhunter & Jubilee Eduard Horn

Martian Manhunter & Jubilee

Eduard Horn

Cyclops from the X-Men Eduard Horn

Cyclops from the X-Men

Eduard Horn

Comic books and psychedelics have a long and storied history, but German designer Eduard Horn has made that connection explicit in a series of images called Kaleidocomix that reimagines his childhood heroes as trippy images of superheroes.

Horn starts each image by finding an intriguing character, composition, or costume element. The comics are modified using Adobe AfterEffects, tweaking the characters and colors with an array of nine mirroring options that transform the image of the hero or ne’er-do-well into a mass of multi-color geometry. Horn likens the images to church windows with their bold colors and hints of heroic figures, but the abstract, geometric nature of many of the designs would feel at home inside a mosque as well. Horn says the ostentatious nature of the artwork made the project fairly easy. “All the kaleidoscope effect from Adobe AfterEffects that I used seemed to give better results using the simplest settings possible.”

Horn is a geek at heart, but paid no mind to the power level of his heroes when crafting the compositions. Whether it’s Batman, Spiderman, or a superannuated superhero like Vampirella, his focus is was entirely on the formal elements of the character’s design and costume. “It wasn’t really about certain heroes per se,” he says. “As you can see in many of my other projects, I tend to play with patterns a lot.”

Comics are known for featuring over-the-top tales of derring-do, but Horn’s preference is for his more understated creations. “I do really like the compositions that involve typography a lot,” he says. “And also the more abstract ones that give you little clue that it might have something to do with comic books.”

He did find that symmetrical images worked better than asymmetrical ones and speech bubbles were a non-starter. “Something that, in my opinion, didn’t work at all was when speech bubbles were in the composition, because I didn’t want the viewers to be distracted by the texts inside.”

Like a mad scientist, Horn plans to continue experimenting with comic kaleidoscopes, either through the use of moving images, or perhaps, building a physical device. “I think it could be nice to experiment with some animated versions of the KaleidoComix images,” says Horn. “I think it might look quite psychedelic and hypnotic at the same time.”

How They Created the Massive War Scenes in The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies

Last week there was a surprising omission from the list of Oscar nominees in the visual effects category: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Weta Digital, the VFX team behind the movie’s special effects, did massive—and massively striking—battle sequences for the film and it was startling to not see the movie nominated, especially since the previous two Hobbit films had gotten nods in the same category. However, that doesn’t diminish the impressive, large-scale conflicts Weta designed for the film. Here’s how they used crowd-simulation and other software to make the powerful clashes in The Battle of the Five Armies.

Banks Are Now Handing Out Loans to People They’d Normally Shun

Skopein/Getty Images

Before Jeff Stewart could credibly advance the notion that your Facebook friend network could—or even should—help you get a loan, he had to prove the system worked and was reliable. It took a long time. I first met him in 2012, a year after he’d launched Lenddo, pitching it as a new way for people just entering the middle class to qualify for and receive loans. His startup planned to use Facebook data to assess credit risk, and to make loans to well-qualified candidates, starting in the Philippines.

I thought it sounded like an interesting idea, but hey, Facebook was still mostly party pictures and a lot of flirting. Hell, my mom had just joined. Trying to imagine the platform would ever be a tool for judging borrowers’ creditworthiness seemed like a stretch.

Three years later, Lenddo has built a thriving business lending money to members of the emerging middle class around the globe. More than 250,000 people have joined Lenddo in its first market, the Philippines. The company, which WIRED wrote about last year, has also launched in Colombia, Mexico, Indonesia and parts of Africa.

In the process, Stewart has tweaked his algorithm, which pulls data from social media sites, so that it has become a reliable predictor of who is likely to pay back loans. “We had to test out all the parts of our thesis—including making loans to people we knew wouldn’t pay us back—to make sure it worked,” Stewart told me when we spoke last week. “By last summer, we finally had enough data to show that the score worked.” The startup’s default rates, according to Stewart, were in the low single digits, mirroring the average default rates in the microfinance industry.

Now that Stewart can prove that his scoring system is dependable, his company has stopped lending. Starting this month, it will instead sell its algorithm, the Lenddo score, to financial institutions, which will use it to make loans. In other words, Lenddo hopes to become, for the Filipino call center worker, what Experian is for me here in the US: the provider of the definitive measure of financial trustworthiness.

From the outset, Lenddo has believed that the digital exhaust of loan candidates offers better evidence that they can repay a loan than what’s provided by a traditional credit score—especially for people just entering the middle class, a group Stewart estimates to include 1.2 billion people worldwide. Their behavior on these networks, as well as the ties they have to others, provides a rich source of data about their character. The Hong Kong-based company has $14 million in capital from Accel Partners and other investors, and it has struck deals with a number of banks. Its customers are institutions like BanKO, the mobile-phone based savings bank that is a joint venture between the Bank of the Philippines Islands, Globe Telecom and Ayala Corporation.

As Internet companies, telecoms and banks all attempt to bring banking to this new group of borrowers, however, the competition is heating up. “There are millions of great credit-worthy customers out there, but today, most of their financial activity is informal and cash based,” says James Moed, a London-based financial services consultant helping companies design new products for the emerging middle class. “Whoever can efficiently translate that behavior into a reliable scoring will have borrowers lining up.” A number of startups like Cignifi are attempting to judge loan risk for these borrowers by analyzing their cell phone activity. Others determine how qualified a loan candidate might be through online personality and trustworthiness tests. Then there’s Affirm, the startup Max Levchin founded that tries to improve upon the commonly used FICO score by incorporating social data among other metrics to judge creditworthiness for consumers (particularly millennials).

With three years’ worth of data, Lenddo has a big head start in the international market. It has nearly a million members on its network who give Lenddo access to their social activity on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail. Lenddo’s software mines that data to see who members communicate with, and how often, and then transforms that information into a score. Says Stewart, “We don’t share any of the data, only a score. Full stop.”

In some cases, Lenddo also asks members to select a group of “trusted friends” as references, drawing from a proven microfinance strategy. If they’re unable to pay back the loan, their references will be deemed less creditworthy.

To become a useful lending tool, however, the Lenddo score must be a recognizable consumer brand. Loan recipients must know to sign up for one, either because it will help them get a loan with their local bank, or because their upstanding social behavior will help their friends get a loan. In its earliest market, that has already happened. Says Stewart, “If you are Filipino, you have among your closest 150 friends those who use Lenddo.”

Now, Lenddo just needs to make that a reality in 195 more countries.

Hey, Videogames: Please Trick Me Into Thinking I’m Smart

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The Astronauts

The first time I stumbled upon one of the murder-mystery puzzles in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I walked right past it. And the second time, too. And the third.

But not the fourth.

Oh, I’m not saying I didn’t give them the old college try. I mean, how do you ignore a set of leg-stumps splayed on a train track, with a thick smear of blood leading away from them to the body of the previous owner of said stumps? This was no mere window decoration, here in the eerie quiet of this secluded forest. I was supposed to do… something. But I poked around the immediate vicinity, and didn’t see anything to do.

Meanwhile, the game’s opening text crawl was still fresh in my head: “This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand.”

Well, I thought, if my hand’s not being held, I may as well just keep walking and see what’s going on. And I walked past a puzzle, then another, then another. This is not me. I am a deliberate player. I like to look at stuff. And I don’t like skipping puzzles. I just didn’t know what I was looking at. And Ethan Carter wanted it that way.

A game that doesn’t grab onto your hand is a refreshing experience these days. But this one could have benefited from a little bit of secret hand-holding.

Released in October 2014, Vanishing of Ethan Carter does call itself a “narrative experience,” but it’s no Gone Home or Dear Esther —that is, it’s not just about wandering around, reading things and absorbing a story with no elements of challenge. It is about those things, but with puzzles.

Now, actually, Ethan Carter would probably have been great with no puzzles, as the environment—a sleepy little hamlet in the mountains—is shockingly gorgeous, and laid out in such a way as to let you almost meditate on its beautiful vistas as you walk through it. The puzzles add just enough challenge to pull you in even more.

What ended up happening to me is that, after solving a few other minor puzzles, I happened into another murder scene. That’s when, after a few false starts—did I need to go find a bulb and reassemble this oil lamp so I could illuminate the crypt (no I did not)?—I accidentally happened upon the esoteric game mechanic that allows you to solve the murders.

The Astronauts

Ethan Carter buries this mechanic, and it’s difficult to discover because you don’t know what to look for. If you’re playing a shooter, you look for the button that shoots. If you’re playing a first-person paranormal mystery investigation narrative, you, uh…

Maybe it was something I’d have happened upon through experimentation. But the way it all went down was a total fluke. Once I realized what I had to do, it was time to race back to the previous murder scene (well, walk slowly back) and solve that too.

I still didn’t solve the game’s very first puzzle until the end of the game, when it gave me a, let’s be frank, rather hand-holdy message that was tantamount to HEY DUMMY, THAT WAS A PUZZLE.

Ethan Carter’s developer properly understands this as a plus. It’s nice to have a game that doesn’t hold your hand, because these days games are if anything over-tutorialized. Developers don’t want to spend $100 million and three years making a game and have you not know how to play it.

And quite frankly, as a player this can be disastrous as well—we all have stories of playing through an entire game without even knowing about a crucial time- and energy-saving maneuver because the game never told us about it. So we make this pact that we’re going to spend the early part of the game being told that the A button is for jumping, then practicing it until the game tells us we got it right.

Contemporary games’ tendency toward overtutorialization was famously parodied a few years ago by a game designer who imagined what the classic Super Mario Bros. would be like if it were introduced today:

Zack Hiwiller/hiwiller.com

Yeah, weren’t games better when they didn’t hold your hand? But Ethan Carter’s opening line reinforces a false choice, between a game that holds your hand and a game that abandons you to your own devices. It’s not hand-holding that players mind. It’s feeling like your hand is being held that’s the problem.

Luckily, we are dumb and can be tricked.

Here’s the actual opening scene of Super Mario Bros., what you see as soon as you start walking. This impossible pyramid of gravity-free bricks is one of the most iconic tableaux in all of gaming, and it’s actually a little tutorial that you’d never notice.

Nintendo/Screengrab: WIRED

There’s an enemy on the ground, and you have to jump over it. (If you don’t figure that out, you ‘ll die and start right here again until you do.) During all this aimless, frantic, novice-level jumping, you’ll probably hit a brick, and thereby learn that when you hit bricks, stuff comes out. One of them pops out a Mushroom, which immediately travels away from you. But then, it ricochets perfectly off the pipe placed in the perfect position to do so, and it heads back towards you. With the bricks over your head limiting the range of your jump, it would be harder not to collide with the mushroom—which turns Mario into giant-size Super Mario.

Now, via this painstakingly, expertly designed mechanism, you’ve learned how to play Super Mario Bros., and you didn’t perceive your hand being held at all.

Yes, I realize it’s very easy and not a little naïve to say “This game should be more like Super Mario Bros.” But Ethan Carter could have been helped by some little trick like that, some very brief trap for the player that guides them to solving an early puzzle so they don’t have to happen into it, but that makes them think they did it all on their own.

Putting the “this game doesn’t hold your hand” line in written text at the game’s beginning is a nice touch. It actually is a direction to the player, if a minimally intrusive one. Had that not been there, I wouldn’t have reacted nearly as well to finding that first dead body and not really being able to make anything happen within the game while I was standing there.

“This game doesn’t hold your hand” was a permission slip for me: If I didn’t know what to do, that didn’t mean that I was failing or that I was missing things—I should just keep walking. Go on, cross that bridge, try going over there, don’t worry that you’re forgetting something. And since the game is so beautiful that I wanted to see more and more of it, always needed to see what was over the next hill or around that corner, it was nice to feel free to do that.

But eventually, you do need to start figuring out what to do. And if you want players to discover things more quickly, remember there’s no difference between discovering them entirely on your own and being tricked into thinking you did.