Using Photographs to Enhance Video of a Static Scene is an amazing post production development that combines normal video footage with photographs of the same scene to provide a number of beautiful enhancements. The technology can be used to actually bump the resolution of the video up, provide higher exposures, and even mask out or touch up areas of the video seamlessly by only masking or manipulating a few video frames. The demo video shows it all.

Finding Paths is an unbelievably cool cloud 3-D photo viewer created by a collaborative research team from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. It's similar to Photosynth but these demo's shown at SIGGRAPH 08 may prove otherwise. Finding Paths through the World's Photos' technology allows you to take a 3D tour of any environment that has a large collection of photographs. Think of Flickr or Picasa, but now imagine actually walking INTO the pictures in an almost seamless visual experience, almost as if you are really there. Just watch the video, it'll make more sense.

Anastasia Ward is an interactive toy sculpture artist. She takes toys apart, reassembles the pieces, and reskins them to create some bizarre and pretty weird new creatures. All of her genetic experiment looking toys are pretty surreal and would normally be found in my nightmares. Here's an incredible video care of Rocketboom interviewing the artist. Check the jump for some more pics.

The Heart Robot is a kind of creepy Tim Burton-esque puppet/robot experiment created by a team of Bristol UK researchers and artists in order to investigate the effects that a seemingly emotional machine can have on humans. I have a strange feeling it will somehow be responsible for the start of the zombie apocolypse. The demon puppet can sense changes in sound, light and movement through automated control of eye movement, a virtual heartbeat and breath which inflates his belly and exhales through his nostrils. Seriously?

More pix after the jump