Specterras Productions

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Specterras Productions

Specterras creates 3D virtual reality experiences of nature and culture using the best technologies available.

Specterras creates 3D immersive experiences of the natural and cultural world using the best technologies available. We pride ourselves on a level of detail that captures the tiniest leaves, rock details, moss, water, and plants. Our experiences allow people to move with complete freedom. Our experiences are customizable for virtual reality headsets including the Oculus Rift, Samsung GearVR, large

-scale multimedia projections, IOS devices, Macs and PCs, and gaming consoles. Our aim is to so immerse people in nature (and culture) that they feel like they are really there.

08/16/2024

If you’ve arrived here looking for the most elevated burrito in NYC, you’ll be pointed in the right direction. Meaning “little donkey” in Spanish, the burrito, experts speculate, was named as such because, like a donkey, it contains various items or ingredients. Like vodka, the origin story of the burrito is complicated, controversial, and inconclusive. However, what isn’t inconclusive is how damn delicious the burritos at Son Del North are, so if you are in the Lower East Side, it is worth a stop, and if you are in the city, it is worth a diversion. Having spoken with the co-owners (two-time Chopped winner) and (both very kind and menschy people), it was clear that a lot of thought, planning, and culinary chops went into the conception of this eatery. We tried the Camarón Ranchero, a Sinoloan-inspired rice-free tortilla-wrapped flavor sinfonía with shrimp, pico de gallo, salsa roja, avocado, cheese, and creamy Peruvian beans that were, according to Chef Annisha, generously handed down by her unparalleled abuelita. While I love Mexican food, the output in the US is often underwhelming. is not just the antidote to passable but widely available Mexican fair; it is, without a doubt, one of the best burritos in NYC and, I dare say, the country.

07/11/2024

Summer in NYC is a uniquely sticky, stinky, and stupefying proposition. Sure, there is the ubiquitous odor of sun-kissed miscellaneous garbage and decomposing door dash leftovers wafting in the air, the pyramidal heaps of bloated black trash bags, subway temperatures soaring to levels more appropriate for a Sky Ting yoga class, and, of course, the dank urban humidity that seems to permeate the fibers of even the most moisture-wicking fabrics. But, if you can see through the heat and occasional foul NYC summer potpourri, it is one of the best times to hop around town.

Many NYC residents travel on weekends (Long Island, Fire Island, Catskills, etc.) or work remotely during summer. Fewer tourists file along the narrow sidewalks and parks, and Midtown becomes oddly tolerable (Midtown during the high season has what some might call a prickly pedestrian problem). Restaurants like Una Pizzeria Napoletana and Tatiana are more accessible for walk-in scenarios, and Downtown has a distinctly more “local” and minimal vibe (heat keeps tourists and Westchester county daytrippers at bay).

The numerous museums offer a chilly respite from the heat. Among the many world-class museums, the Met, where these two enjoy impromptu ice cream, is not only nicely air-conditioned; it is the 4th largest museum in the world. And don’t be fooled by the crowds of people and yellow cabs by the 5th Ave entrance; there are more than 2.2 million (yes, that’s million) square feet to explore. And there is always a nook tucked away where you can feel a sense of calm and relative isolation. So, if you want to escape the balmy NYC heat, look no further than the Met, even on the weekend. And don’t forget to bounce around the city and graze at the many tasty eateries and gelaterias. What’s your favorite NYC summer maneuver?

06/25/2024

Today is election day in NYC, and Democratic primary Congressional candidates are not pulling any punches. The theme of the election, as this is obviously a Democratic stronghold, is the tension and growing antagonisms between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic party. Whatever your political persuasion, a healthy democratic system requires informing yourself on the issues (and while political ads and poll volunteers are helpful), they are better ways to make an intelligent voting decision. Take a look at Ballotpedia if you have not gotten to know your primary candidates.

06/19/2024

Happy Juneteenth to all! Today is a day worth celebrating for all the civil rights leaders and ordinary people who fought and (and still fight) for a more just and humane world. Willie Mays, one of the greatest players in baseball, passed away yesterday. Though it is not a tragic passing (the man was 93), it is a story that is interesting and relevant to the time in which we live.

By all accounts, Willie Mays was kind on and off the field. He even played stickball with local kids in Harlem between games for the Brooklyn Dodgers. However, Mays preferred not to delve into racial, political, and social issues, saying, “I’m a ballplayer. I am not a politician or a writer or a historian. I can do best for my people by doing what I do best.” Like Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson used his athletic platform to promote vital political change and civil rights legislation. Our athletes and celebrities, especially with the influence of social media, are very aware of the risk associated with offending the wrong people. Michael Jordan, who famously steered clear of political commentary, once said in response that “Republicans buy sneakers too.” Lebron James has taken a different approach, and so has Colin Kaepernick.

Juneteenth is not just a day of celebration but also a reflection on what can be improved and what should be changed. Did Willie Mays take the right approach in letting his on-the-field performance “do the talking”? Was Jackie Robinson justified in his criticism of Mays? What should we be willing to do and say in the context of our work and careers to promote fundamental human rights and equality?

04/22/2024

Earth Day is a token holiday of sorts. Like National Empanada Day, we might celebrate the holiday through a bit of self-indulgence, like sussing out a delectably cheesy empanada or watching a David Attenborough-narrated Planet Earth documentary. But there is more we can do for the cause than affirm our love of nature and the creatures that inhabit it. It can also be a time to take inventory of our behavior individually and as a society and make some changes that might collectively make a difference so that our children and children’s children might live in a more habitable world. I recall the great Joaquin Phoenix, several years ago, commenting to a primarily stunned “liberal” Hollywood crowd that “We don’t have to take private jets to Palm Springs for the awards — and back,” and that it might be worth looking into how our choices may be contributing to the wildfires raging in the Blue Mountains of Australia, a UNESCO world heritage site from which these pictures were taken. Most of us do not have the option to “fly private”; however, we can “vote” with the choices we make. (cont. in comments)

03/15/2024

Italianness and the Procession of Calcio Storico — Italy is, in the eyes of many Americans (including “educated” ones), a monolith of pasta, pizza, and Puccini operas; that is, a proud, ethnically homogeneous country with a strong sense of self. While great for selling Barilla pasta and package tours of the Amalfi coast, this image could not be further from what Italy really is: a copper pot of different ethnicities, cuisines, dialects, and political and commercial interests. A moment that jelled in my brain was during a work trip to Sardinia. My friend (and local guide) grew up in Dorgali. This small village is on the East Coast and sustains itself primarily through collective wine production and tourism. Donatella took me to Orgosolo, a hilltop town 15 minutes from her home. We stood by a local bar - a few of her friends were drinking small beers and looking at people coming and going. Donatella greets them, then turns to me, saying, “I don’t understand a word they are saying. They are speaking Orgosolese.” Donatella is a fluent Sardo speaker (the Italo-Sardinian dialect) but needed help to make sense of their dialect. This is Italy.

This picture is a procession for Calcio Storico, a sport and ritual held annually in a sand pit in the Piazza Santa Croce. It’s a combination of soccer and bare-knuckle boxing. The event organizers field teams from four distinct Florentine quartiere (or administrative areas). Players aren’t compensated - they compete for the glory of their neighborhood. It is, in that sense, very Italian. Soccer is similar in that team loyalties typically coincide with a strong (and distinct) local identity. Some talk about the divisions between the North and South of Italy, and as accurate as that may be, when you start accounting for the different and distinct traditions of Florence, Bologna, Verona, Naples, Sassari, or even the municipal quartiere of Florence you begin to realize that Italy is not just Pavarotti and bolognese, it’s a patchwork quilt of different identities.

03/08/2024

The talented, beautiful, and congenial Chef De Cuisine, Kamat Newman at the sensational Tatianna in Lincoln Center. Tatianna was named the best restaurant in NYC by the New York Times, and while these rankings are pretty arbitrary, my wee taste buds could confirm why this restaurant is so well regarded. Tatianna’s cuisine is a sort of Afro-Caribbean fusion, and it does not fall short in terms of taste, novelty, and aesthetic. My experience was limited to one visit, but what an impression that visit had. There are occasions in my gustatory explorations where something is so distinct and tasty that it is tattooed on my olfactory-hippocampal highway. The prototypical example for me is my first “goh risotto” at Trattoria da Romano in Burano (not to be missed if you’re in Venice). Not many dishes make it to my so-called pantheon of culinary delights—even Michelin-star meals can admittedly be very forgettable. The dish that qualified as a first-ballot contender at Tatianna was as understated as its name might suggest: the hummus. I hesitated to order the dish, but the wine guy assured me that this wasn’t my falafel-stand hummus. How can something as mundane and ubiquitous as hummus be memorable? Well, this was a black bean hummus with berbere spiced lamb, sweet pickles, and msemmen (a sort of North African flatbread), culminating in what can only crudely be described as a taste-bud or**sm. The branzino was also sensational, as was the golden rum cake. So if you are planning a trip to NYC, and especially if you happen to be seeing a show at the Metropolitan Opera, do yourself a favor and get your butt to Tatianna. If you can’t get a reservation, you can wait in line at the door (it opens at 5 pm), put your name in, grab a drink at PJ Clarks across the street, and double back when they text you.

03/01/2024

A throwback Thursday picture from the COVID pandemic in Puerto Rico while on a job. This would have been fairly cliche had social distancing not been mandated. Love is a dangerous proposition, especially during a pandemic, but sometimes the best decisions are neither entirely voluntary or reasonable. Or as Slavoj Zizek once hilariously put it, “If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”

02/09/2024

It is safe to say Terra Blues is a Greenwich Village institution. It has been around for over three decades - enduring 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a dizzying real estate market with blues-riffing gusto. The cover is reasonable, the drinks are expertly crafted (at least my Negroni was), the bands are fire, and the “gatekeeper” of this fine institution, aka Seti, aka the “face of the place,” is a delight to chew the fat with. He is there most weekend nights and is as much a part of the identity of Terra Blues as the talented musicians that frequent this neighborhood jam hive. Among other things, New York is an extraordinary place because of the many people who cultivate their idiosyncratic vibe and style. Great catalogers like , , , and many others have documented this aspect of NY life, some for longer than I’ve been alive. It is people like Seti, however, that make the streets and avenues a veritable runway of urban life. Thanks, , for your good vibes, style, and conversation.

02/01/2024

This is part of the “Great Trail”, an ancient thoroughfare once part of a network of Native American highways. When witnessing this scene, the thought of a cowboy on a rearing horse, a la John Ford or Sergio Leone, came to mind. Our office in downtown Brooklyn is less than 1 km from here - a building that is one of many gleaming highrises rising like bamboo culms from the concrete bed below. I have gotten to know several security guards on duty in my ins and outs. Carlos is a legacy owner in downtown Brooklyn, one of the fortunate people who inherited a home from a mother, father, or relative. He talks about how his life here would be impossible without his parents’ wise investment. We talked about what Flatbush Ave used to be like. He said you’d have had a hard time giving out real estate for free when he was growing up, and there certainly was no Whole Foods, Apple store, or barre studio. It was like the “Wild West.” And if you were white, getting mugged would be a real possibility (what some lifetime residents in the surrounding area describe as a Brooklynian “rite of passage”). For Carlos, the thought of $3000 studio apartments in this neighborhood was once incomprehensible - now it is the new normal. Gentrification is a problematic but inevitable byproduct of urban life. Addressing these issues requires looking at how cities in other countries (like Vienna, Austria) have managed to provide high-quality housing in a place with such a well-documented quality of life.

01/29/2024

New York City is a people-watching paradise, full of all the eccentricities, oddities, and around-the-corner wonderment that one might expect. This striking man was pacing along Flatbush Ave., a 10-mile-long commercial thoroughfare in Brooklyn. Before the 17th-century “ferry roads” constructed by the Dutch, Flatbush Ave. was part of the Great Trail network of footpaths connecting Native-American tribes and villages. Initially used for trade, commercial activity, hunting, and communication, the Great Trail between tribes would later be used as footprints for colonial roads and, eventually, many of the highways we use today.

01/25/2024

This image was “prompted” by a documentary recently released about the oft-sampled R&B artist Luther Vandross. Vandross was first “discovered” by two-time collaborator David Bowie (they worked on “Young Americans” together. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming a tool in all creative work, my own included. However, you can’t just push a button and presto out comes a masterpiece - like a dog, it needs to be properly “trained.” And even then, it is better used as a collab between man and machine. This image is a sort of musical “Frankenstein”, a man created from two late artists, David Bowie and Luther Vandross. As this technology advances, we can count on dead artists being reanimated as singing and dancing Frankenperformers. It’s a brave new world...

01/20/2024

A boy drives an e-scooter from school to his Florentine home. Though the ubiquitous motorino or Vespa is still the prevailing form of two-wheel transportation in the cradle of the Renaissance, e-scooters popularized by Lime, BiT Mobility, and Tmove are making significant inroads. I liked this scene, partly because Italians (even in a city as historically steeped in innovation as Florence) stick to the tried and true (like good pasta, pizza, or osso bucco) and make marginal improvements to the things that work. This is not to say Italy is not innovative, but it is a culture with a Bolognese-like bureaucracy; change requires a slow simmer, and tradition takes precedence. In many ways, this makes Italy such a phenomenal vacation destination, but it also makes it difficult for entrepreneurs and disruptors. A story I read about a Milanese man illustrates the point. At 45, Bernardo Caprotti applied for a permit to build a supermarket on a suburban lot. His permits did come through to break ground on the market; however, not until after his 88th birthday. As the Italians would say, “Così è la vita!” Or, such is life (in Italy).

This image was taken by exposing for background highlights (and a slower shutter speed 1/160, ISO 100) to create a more painterly foreground by leveraging artifacts and noise from the sensor.

01/18/2024

Fiesole is nestled in the foothills of Appanines, above (and looking down on) its municipal chum, Florence. If Italy were a schiacciato (singular for schiacciata), a traditional Florentine flatbread often used for sandwiches, then the Appanines are the meaty lampredotto that straddles the interior of the Italian panino. This hill town has the highest median income in the municipality of Florence. It hosts satellite college campuses for Harvard and Georgetown. It is also the setting for The Decameron, a story set in the 14th century during the Black Death (1347-1352), a pandemic spread by the flea-borne bacterium Yersinia pestis. The most prevalent variation of the Black Death, the bubonic plague, comes from the Greek word for groin (boubṓn), and rates of mortality ranged from 70%-80%. Symptoms included swollen lymph nodes at the sight of infection (often the groin, ugh), fever, vomiting, necrosis (tissue death), gangrene, delirium, and more. By comparison, COVID-19 carries a mortality rate of about 1.4%. Such a deadly pandemic could not be explained in the 14th century (modern medicine and biology were not what they are today), so the explanation de jure was what one might expect when humanity can not explain the inexplicable: God. Incidentally, many of the stories in the Decameron suggest widespread corruption in the Catholic church (there’s also a lot of lewdness and fornication). During the Decameron’s writing, Fiesole was a refuge from the rats, rabble, and rapid disease transmission in the city. In the intro, Boccaccio professes his love of women (a very Italian thing to do) and mentions the context in which it is written — the death of half the Florentine population (that’s a bummer, man).
CONTINUED…

01/08/2024

A man dying of thirst, inverts his water bottle over his mouth, as a dozen people wait impatiently for access to one of the few (drinking) water fountains in the Boboli Gardens.

While work began in 1549, the Boboli Gardens only became accessible to the public some 200 years later, that is, in 1766. Before that time, it was the private garden (and the largest of its kind in Florence) of the Medici family. The Pitti Palace, of which the Boboli Gardens is a part, was the seat of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany. It is about 111 acres in area and contains the Buontalenti grotto, and impressive amphitheatre, and an oddly placed Hapsburg Rocco coffeehouse (those Austrians love their coffee), aptly called the”Kaffeehaus.” This garden required some expert engineering as it did not have a viable water source to supply its numerous plantings and fountains. A complex irrigation was constructed, providing water from the Arno, the river you cross over the Ponte Vecchio. It is also the original home of MIchelangelo’s Prisoners, which you can now find at the L’Accademia museum along with Michelangelo’s David. The summer heat here can be oppressive, so it is advisable to come here on a cool day or a summer morning before things get especially sticky.

Address

55 Magazine Street
Cambridge, MA
02139

Telephone

+19782398429

Website

http://www.specterras.com/

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