We’ve all seen infinity mirrors. Even Mr. Spock had one in the Star Trek movies. Usually, these aren’t very large and hang on the wall. [QuackMasterDan] decided (after watching another movie, Interstellar) to try making a desk using the same idea. We aren’t sure it will make you more productive, but if you want to up your office cool factor, consider building his tesseract infinity desk. In fact, we imagine it would be pretty distracting. Sure to be a conversation starter, though.
Unlike a regular two-plate infinity mirror, [Dan’s] desk has six plates. He used metal for the structural parts of the desk and the top is a sandwich of an acrylic mirror and a large piece of half-inch tempered glass (available–unsurprisingly–on Amazon). There’s also privacy film to make the glass into a one-way mirror. He also includes instructions on how to make a wood version, too. You can see the desk in a video, below.
The real story here is mechanical and artistic. The electronics are nothing more than strip LED lighting and a common controller. We though a custom controller that could modulate and control the lights from the computer might be fun. Your desk could blink when an important e-mail arrives. Or maybe let the desk change color and intensity based on your CPU temperature.
The video also shows a fast-motion sequence of the build, which doesn’t look too hard until you try it in your garage, of course. We’ve seen some movie-inspired LED builds before, but this desk is probably the largest. Speaking of movie-inspired desks, though, we remember one inspired by Minority Report.
To make it more Interstellar like, the table should spin at 67.68 RPM and with a looping MP3 track with the organ music from the movie. LCD screens instead LED rope lights with a slide show and movie clips from the family album would also add to the tesseract feel. Please bear with me, I’m just an asshole today.
To be even more like Interstellar, the music and ambient noise in the room should be excessively loud, and everyone in the room should whisper constantly so you can’t hear what anyone is saying.
Probably the quickest I ever gave up on a movie, and I sat though 2001.
When is someone going to build a fully functional version of Dillinger’s desk from the original TRON?
Shouldn’t be that hard…
I personally have neither the space nor the use case for it.
But seriously – it’s basically some TFTs behind a certain type of plexi that seems black when not backlit, yet shows lit up things behind it. You would have to apply your own touch-system tho – surface finish will be the real problem, maybe just go with a top-down camera and openCV.
Or find an Alibaba supplier that sells you a 4 square meter touch-foil :-)
As soon as 8ft touchscreen monitors become cheap enough for us mere mortals to afford, I’d guess. Or maybe some YouTube star with a sweet sponsorship deal could pull it off before then.
Build a cheap optical touchscreen like Microsoft did for the Surface 1.0.
That’s my wish since the movie first came out! I even tried to do something similar with my first EGA monitor at the begining of the 90’s and got cervical problems fast, having to look down all the time to see the screen.
Maybe it would be better with a standard monitor at eye level with a couple of smaller monitors embedded into the desk at the sides (for displaying statuses, cctv, stocks, etc) and the touch sensitive keyboard and touchpad in the center.
And MCP’s voice, of course (though I would “settle” for Majel Barret’s)
Good point about ergonomics. You wouldn’t want to use the Tron desk for long, and it’s a problem you can’t get away from as long as the screen and keyboard/mouse are one and the same.
I think a decent compromise for a practical Tron desk might be to have a big touchscreen monitor close to the seat mainly for input, and separate monitors further ahead of the seat that can fold flush into the desk to look cool, or pop up to a vertical position for doing real work.
I told my wife that if I built this, I’d make the colors correspond to how many tabs I have open (and active) in Chrome. Red = stay away. ;)
Looks nice! I’ve been contemplating building a standup MAME cabinet and was thinking of something a little more unique to do for the cabinet sides than just plain old 3/4″ plywood, so this is giving me ideas…
Its interesting to note that only a few years ago when we used pen and paper for everything it was the norm to have everything flat on the desk.
Sure, but the posture for writing is very different.
If you look at antique writing desks you will find that is not the case. They’re all tilted up at 30-40*. Most school desks have a slight incline them, 10-15*