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April 20 2012
What a Real Spaceship Cockpit Looks Like
Sweet find by our own Rachel Hobson over on National Geographic: A zoomable high-resolution panorama of Discovery’s flight deck, by photographer Jon Brack. I swear I’ve found at least one stripped screw head. [Thanks, Rachel!]
Space Shuttle in Extreme Detail
April 09 2012
“The best LED cube build we’ve seen”
And the Hack a Day writers have seen a bunch of them. We’ve covered quite a few, ourselves, and I have to concur that this 8x8x8 RGB from Nick Schulze is the best looking, best designed, and (certainly) best documented LED cube build of the lot. Don’t miss the vid, embedded above, to show off what it can do, or the tutorial, linked below, to show off the thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and ingenuity that went into its design and construction. [via Hack a Day]
March 26 2012
Laser Oscilloscope Wraps up Year of Hacks
Congrats to MAKE pal Dino Segovis, who just published the 52nd and final project in his one-year Hack a Week series: This cool laser “oscillograph” that modulates an audio input across the beam from a green laser pointer using a linear actuator recovered from a junk hard drive. A spinning mirror provides the time element.
One thing I’ve always liked about Dino’s projects is that he reports his failures: What you tried that didn’t work is usually just as important, to yourself and to readers, as what you tried that did. But a lot of people skip it to save time and, perhaps, some element of personal embarrassment. Anyway: WTG, Dino! And thanks!
An AR Desktop Behind a Clear LCD
Stevie Bathiche, director of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group, introduces this video from GeekWire by explaining that “it looks like we just took an LCD and took the backlight off, but that’s actually not true. There’s actually been a lot of work that Samsung has done to improve the transmission quality of this display.”
Be that as it may, I can imagine building a fairly cheap DIY version of this device by doing exactly that. The optical transmission quality of your backlight-stripped LCD monitor may not be quite as good as their prototype, but, then, you could always turn on more lights behind it.
Apart from the transparent screen, the system uses two Kinects—one to track the position of the user’s head and adjust the viewing angle of the model accordingly, and a second to track how the user’s fingers are “manipulating” the model in the space behind the screen.
Move the keyboard behind the screen, as well, and the game gets more interesting, as the system can replace the mouse, and its implied 2D desktop model, with a fully spatial metaphor in which lifting your hand off the keyboard gives instant access to a 3D GUI. The video wraps up by demonstrating some of the possibilities. [via adafruit]
Desktop of the future? Microsoft tests transparent PC display with Kinect controls
March 02 2012
Pyramidal Prisms Over a Flat Panel Display
Interesting, unusual concept from artist Kit Webster, who has covered the surface of a flat panel display with a grid of square pyramidal prisms of various sizes. The image displayed on the underlying screen is designed to interact optically with the prisms, bringing patterns of light and color up out of the screen into the third dimension. This seems like a pretty rich technique for experimentation. I don’t recall having seen it before, and between the number, size, shape, and arrangement of the prisms, and the huge number of ways the screen image could be designed to interact with them, the possibilities are quite vast. [via Boing Boing]
February 23 2012
How-To: Build and Use an Afghan Box Camera
My old pal, Bay Area shutterbug Billy Baque, has a passion for the handmade, low-tech, all-in-one cameras-plus-darkrooms used by street photographers around the world. The so-called Cuban Polaroid is a typical example—a wooden box with a light-tight sleeve for the photographer’s arm at one end and a lens on the other. Billy describes the typical use:
Using photographic printing paper the photographer would expose a sheet of paper for the negative, develop, stop, and fix it inside the camera, then put a copy stand on the camera and photograph the negative (to obtain a positive), develop, stop, and fix, then wash the final print in a coffee can of water attached to his homemade tripod.
Billy just hipped me to Lukas Birk’s Afghan Box Camera Project, an ethnographic study documenting the rapidly-vanishing traditions, technologies, and skills of street photographers in Kabul. The Afghan version of the Cuban Polaroid is known as the kamra-e-faoree, and Mr. Birk has gone to considerable lengths to document its traditional construction and use, preparing a detailed build guide and an on-site video minutely recording lifelong Kabuli street photographer Qalam Nabi, in action, with his. [Thanks, Billy!]
February 21 2012
Enhance iPhone Macro Shots with 8x Lens
The current iPhone takes a pretty decent macro shot to begin with. If you’re looking to go beyond what you get out-of-box, take a look at the 8x macro lens from Westchester, IL area Etsy user Chris Ferguson. It’s a machined hunk of ABS with quality optics that adheres to the iPhone 4′s case with a sticky gel pad that’s easily removed without marring the finish.
February 07 2012
Kinect Haptic Belt Helps the Blind to Navigate Obstacles
The viSparsh belt developed by Young India Fellows Rolly Seth, Jatin Sharma and Tushar Chugh in New Delhi with guidance by Rahul Mangharam of the University of Pennsylvania, is a computer vision assisted haptic feedback system that uses a Microsoft Kinect to detect objects near the wearer and notifies them through an array of vibration motors across the belt. [via /.]
January 26 2012
Super Slow Motion Canon DSLR Shutter Action
Destin of Smarter Every Day took the lens off his Canon 60D, pointed a Phantom Flex high speed video camera at the shutter, and took a picture. The exposure cycle happens in four stages and lasts less than a tenth of a second in real time, but the Phantom Flex stretches that action out to almost a full minute of screen time at YouTube framerates. Udi Tirosh of DIYPhotography.net breaks it down. [Thanks, Udi!]
January 24 2012
DIY Phased Array Radar From Pegboard and Wi-Fi Antennas
Yes, you read that correctly.
No hard technical details are out yet, but this amazing project from MIT radar hackers Drs. Bradley Perry, Jonathan Paul Kitchens, Patrick Bell, Jeffrey Herd, and MAKE regular Gregory L. Charvat is soon to be published as part of MIT’s open courseware initiative. Cost of parts is about $950. The course abstract describes a “laptop-based phased array radar sensor capable of imaging moving targets in real-time, like a ‘radar video camera’.” [Thanks, Greg!]
January 23 2012
Interactive Still Life Tumbles When You Tilt The Frame
Neat idea, skillfully executed, from artist Scott Garner, who writes:
On the hardware side is a custom-framed television connected to a rotating mount from Ergomart. Attached to the back of the television is a spatial sensor from Phidgets, makers of fine USB sensors. On the software side is a simple C application to communicate with the sensor and feed the data to a Unity 3D scene. The scene itself consists of a camera tied to the sensor data with all lights and objects parented to it so they rotate in unison.
[Thanks, Scott!]
How-To: Augmented Reality with Processing
Creative Applications posted this thorough guide to getting started with augmented reality in Processing. They use NyARToolkit, which is an open source augmented reality library for Java and other languages. The tutorial starts off with a very basic example of using the toolkit to augment 3D boxes on an image (see above). It then moves into more advanced live video and 3D techniques. Hit play on the video above to check out some of the other cool stuff you can do with augmented reality.
More:
- News From The Future: Augmented Reality Advertising Takeover
- Layar Augmented Reality for MAKE Vol 28 (and How to Make Your Own)
- DIY iPad Augmented Reality Cars
January 20 2012
Detecting Dirty Dishes with OpenCV
While I’m no slob, I’ve left my fair share of dirty dishes in the sink, much to the chagrin of my former roommates. But who hasn’t left a plate, spoon, or glass in the sink when you’re in a rush to get out of the house every now and then? What happens in a shared space like a hackerspace, where you could have as many as fifty people passing through the communal kitchen in a given day? All those cups start to pile up quickly, I’m sure. Not one to let things get out of hand, London Hackspace member Tom created a solution to combat the problem. True to hackerspace form, he combined different open source technologies to alert the members in the space when a dish has been left in the sink for more than a few minutes.
To create this so-called Great OpenCV Washing-Up Detector, Tom mounted a PS3 Eye camera pointing down at the sink, connected to a BeagleBone running Debian. He used the HoughCircles function in the OpenCV library to detect the circular shape of glasses and plates from each frame. When a dish has been in the sink too long, it sends a signal over the network to an Arduino. The Arduino controls a set of relays to turn on the lights inside a traffic light, signalling to everyone in the space that someone needs to suck it up and put on the dishwashing gloves already. The system even utilizes London Hackspace’s IRC bot to alert chatters in their channel.
For those of you who want to implement a similar plan in your shared space, Tom uploaded his code to Github. In the meantime, he isn’t letting up in his crusade to give the lazy members a free pass. He plans on wiring red LED strips above the sink as an alert and even a camera to catch mug shots of the offenders. And what about cutlery and non circular dishes? Tom hopes a Kinect version of this system will help him detect those as well. So if you think you’ll be able can cheat the system by using square plates, you’ve got another think coming.
January 11 2012
Alt.CES: Parrot AR.Drone 2.0
One of the more exciting things to come out of CES so far is the upgraded version of the Parrot AR.Drone. This quadcopter made a splash at last year’s show, with its on-board camera, WiFi connectivity, smartphone control, open source software, and under $300 price point.
This year, the Drone is back and it’s now sporting an updated 720p camera, HD recording, geo-location tech, automatable fly and record capability, and much improved flight control software and hardware improvements for better auto-stabilization and flying. The AR.Drone can be controlled from both Android and iPhones. The Drone is sold as a flying game platform — as a toy — but with these changes, this becomes a serious device and fits right in with PT’s prediction about 2012 being the year of the drone. The AR.Drone 2.0 will retail for the same price as the original and is expected to be available in Q2 2012.
To see some of the cool things that people are doing with AR.Drones, see Dronehacks.
More:
Lumarca on Display at Eyebeam
Lumarca is a projection-based 3D volumetric display, which is collaboration between Albert Hwang, Matt Parker, and Elliot Woods. In 2010, they were the winners of Red Bull’s “Create the Future” contest at World Maker Faire New York. With a height of fifteen feet, the latest iteration of the Lumarca concept is the tallest yet and will be on display at Eyebeam in New York City starting tomorrow night.
Lumarca at Eyebeam
Thursday, January 12, 2012 – Saturday, February 4, 2012
Opening party Thursday, January 12, 6pm – 8pm
Eyebeam
540 West 21st Street, NYC
January 05 2012
Computer Vision Camo: CV Dazzle
Remember Dazzle, the method of complex geometric camouflage painting introduced in WWI (designed to disguise the direction, size, and types of ships at sea)? Last year, ITP student Adam Harvey’s Dazzle CV project brought a similar technology to modern facial recognition software. Using hair and make-up tricks, Adam realized you could fairly easily defeat facial recognition algorithms found in CV software and face-recog bots like the ones that Facebook and Flickr uses. And, you get to look like a neo-tribal cyberpunk in the process. He describes CV Dazzle as “antagonistic technology.” Eye of HAL, your move. [Thanks, Jake!]
January 04 2012
Princess Leia “Hologram” Vapor Display
In fact, this is a two-dimensional video image projected on a curtain of water vapor produced by an ultrasonic humidifier hacked onto a laminar flow nozzle made out of a bunch of drinking straws. Not strictly a hologram, but still a very cool thingum. It’s the work of Chris Weisbart, aka YouTuber ChristopherTalosian, and comes to us via Mike Senese, who provides this description:
Based on the concept behind commercial units, but using everyday items (drinking straws, scrap PVC pipe, a kid’s humidifier from the thrift store, some scrap computer fans), he rigged up a device that creates a thin, even sheet of vapor mist. Almost translucent, but able to catch the light projected onto it from a rear-facing projector — which gives an eerie, floating hologram effect…
A similar technique uses a piece of thin muslin as a screen, as for instance in this haunt-prop “Shining” twins illusion. [Thanks, Mike!]
More:
Hologram demo using Kinect
December 23 2011
“Swimming Koi” Scanimation Table / Rug Illusion
Extremely clever trick from designer John Leung, who’s put a coffee table with an optical grill on top of a rug patterned with a few “hashed” frames of a simple, looping animation. The net result? As you move around the room, the patterns on the rug, viewed through the table, appear to move. Dude Craft has a great “scanimation” tutorial that demonstrates how to make images of this type. [Thanks, Matt Mets!]
More:
December 14 2011
How-To: Build Your Own Stop Motion Armatures
Animator Charles F. Hamper of Monterey Motion Graphics published a cool tutorial on how he makes his own adjustable stop-motion puppet armature parts from hardware-store raw materials including stock brass, threaded rod, and lamp parts. The images are small, but they’re big enough to see what’s going on.
December 13 2011
Seeing EM Waves With a Single LED
Radio whiz Greg Charvat just published this video showing off a very cool experiment with the low-cost coffee can radar system he and co-workers developed, in the fall of 2010, for MIT’s open courseware initiative.
In the video, Greg describes and demonstrates a simple circuit that causes a red/green LED on the receiving antenna to glow one color when the amplitude of the received wave is positive, and another when it is negative. Moving the LED back and forth in front of the transmitter, while taking a long-exposure photograph, gives a visual map of the wavefront in space. Impressive! [Thanks, Greg!]
More:
- How-To: Coffee Can Radar
- How-To: Build a synthetic aperture radar from $240 worth of junk
- PARTS radio perfect for apocalypse readiness
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