[Nirav] liked the idea of having his own personal Earth at the tip of his fingers, and since that’s not happening any time soon, he decided to build the next best thing. Sure, he could have simply gone out and purchased a globe, but there is no fun in that. Instead, he shows us how he put together an interactive spherical display that won’t break the bank.
The sphere uses a Microvision SHOWWX to drive its display, which projects an image inside of a frosted glass light fixture. The pico projector gets some help from a 180° fisheye lens along the way, enabling the picture to be stretched across the entire inner surface of the globe.
[Nirav] used his 3D extruder to build a base for the globe, which attaches to the projector via a printed mounting plate. A GorillaPod was used to keep things upright while he dusted off his trigonometry skills in order to figure out how to get the image just right.
We think that he did a great job – it definitely looks to be on par (albeit a bit smaller) than the eye of Sauron globe we saw a while back. We can’t wait to see a video of this thing in action once it’s completely finished!
Now add multitouch sensors so you can pinch zoom into different areas!
Also add a tour of world history. Watch as national borders move, appear and disappear. See Germany unify and the USSR break up!
Oh, I like this idea. I’m going to do this if I can find freely licensed historical maps in a format I can read.
Get an animated map of Pangaea to today
that is amazing, and perhaps link to google earth This has HUGE potential.
Chat that’s what i was thinking
9 out of 10 evil geniuses agree this is badass.
Can you combine this with a video phone and a kinex so you can have a 3d like video calls? I would do it but my idea of high tech work skills (duct taping a flash light to a hammer for night time nailling)
Now that’s freaking funny!!
Best idea I’ve ever heard! I need to try this!
Reminds me of the Santa Trap I came up with when I was 6 or 7. Connect a flashlight to an alarm clock, so when Santa noticed my flashlight was on and went to turn it off, the alarm would wake me up and I’d get to see him.
Grandpa wouldn’t help me make it, though. XD
Not only link it to Google Earth, but get cloud and weather data displayed on there. That would be amazing if you could write software to get the reported cloud data (I think it is updated every 5 minutes) and have it be 5 minutes behind, meanwhile interpolating a smooth animation from the previous frames to create a continuous moving, smooth cloud animation on there as well. I’d drop $1000 for something like that.
Reminds me of this: http://hml.queensu.ca/node/302
I’m pretty sure that’s a few years old, curious if the price (“about $1000” was claimed) has since gone down for the required components. Might be worth some investigation. :-)
And not just Earth – the moon and mars. And entire solar system of planets in your globe. With zoom to to find the various landers.
It’s just a pity that if you push pixels through a lens like that the whole thing becomes either extremely pixelated or needs a very expensive high-res projector.
However I see the projector is mounted with elastics so you can just use the 3D thing when you want and use the projector normally the rest of the time, smart that!
It’s more a 3D projector screen, to be used whenever you want, so it’s a pretty nice hack.
The point about the distortion from projecting a flat, low-resolution image through a fisheye lens reminds me of the project that used hanging filaments to create a volumetric display, by offsetting each level of depth by one pixel width. Of course the device was limited by projector resolution, but it was still quite cool.
i see potential here!
a friend of mine works with science on a sphere.
http://sos.noaa.gov/
Done: http://eclecti.cc/computergraphics/science-on-a-snow-globe-spherical-display
Brad beat me to it.. I was about to post that link. If SOS opened up.. It could be done on a smaller scale with cheaper projectors by DIY-ers.. Maybe even taken into the classroom. They have hundreds of datasets publicly downloadable for the system. Maybe it could be made to work with this guy’s hack.
Dude! This is straight out of SnowCrash!
Good read, but this is literally what I see in the book when they describe it. :P
Imagen having live weather output onto the globe as well!
Not included: White lab coat, wild haircut, evil mad scientist laugh…
That is awesome. I think it would be very cool if it could display the location of orbiting satellites, clouds overhead or even demonstrate the amount of light pollution coming from different parts of the world. I want one so badly lol
It’s always great to see the awesome stuff my former lab partner creates!
I saw a globe similar to this at the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, CA last month. I played with it a bit, it was pretty cool.