For those of you who don’t recall, the Wiremap is a 3d volumetric display built from hundreds of tiny strands. An image is projected onto the strands to achieve 3d effects. [phedhex] has posted an in depth instructable on how to build a wiremap. He covers the construction with lots of good tips as well as giving links to the software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Check out the video after te break to see some fairly impressive 3d patterns.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rDpPex4Agk]
If it can actually control the heighht of the bars then I could see a really awesome equalizer waiting to happen. That, or you could use it like a big 3d bar graph and display your network activity.
I really, really want to make one of these just so I can render the EVE Online universe map on this…
Why not use this for something more useful? I can’t justify taking up this much space with a simple bar graph, though I can see that it has potential.
My question is: Why aren’t there any examples of something more tangible? Although the 3D resolution is limited by design, it seems the system could still be used as a more functional 3d display, rather than a complicated music visualizer.
impressive. Could be useful in topographical situations. it would be really interesting to see the effects achieved by having another one cross through the first on a z axis.
i wanna disco floor made outta that. how sweet would it be to watch people trying to figure out if the floor was flat or not… and think of the parties!
I could see this being used in topographic work as well as in modeling waves without all the messy water business. I am sure there is a math major somewhere drooling over this.
It already has a Z-axis:
http://wiremap.phedhex.com/feature.php?feature_id=update
Would make a really nice way to display FFTs over a period of time. Upping the horizontal resolution (1920×1200 sounds wonderful, though expensive), moving the projector closer (and/or adding an extra lens/triplet to change the focal length, and maybe even adding a fresnel to get closer to parallel projection), and using more and thinner wires in a smaller volume would give you a very convincing ‘solid’ image.
This is really cool.
Hey there Hackaday – thanks for the post, and thanks all for the comments.
I tend to agree with all of your comments – the current implementation lacks some very basic features. I love the idea of topographical rendering – cept I’m not that great a coder by myself (I’m a theater grad, not a comp sci grad).
This is why I’m opening up the code and creating an instruction guide so that I can get other people inspired to build their own and to contribute.
Well it’s surely a kick-ass display with concepts a many left to explore. The art-dept of your school might be interested in this thing! I know I am… but I just don’t have any art-related ideas that make use of it.
Could have been a good occasion to present the software tools used for this: he seems to be using Processing – http://www.processing.org/ which is an open-source gfx creation system built atop of Java.
Yes, actually – I can’t recommend Processing highly enough. I hardly knew anything about programming before I got into this project, and both the environment and the community for processing are friendly, approachable, and helpful.