For those who love travelling around the world, life hasn’t been great for the past two years. World-wide lockdowns and travel restrictions have kept many people stuck inside their own homes when they would rather be jetting off to distant cities. If you’re one of those bothered by Wanderlust, [Alex Shakespeare] might have a solution for you: a window that shows a live image from another location around the world.
To make the experience as lifelike as possible, [Alex] used an actual window in his London home and mounted a large TV behind it. A wall-mounted map enables him to choose any of five locations by moving a little magnetic plane across the map. LEDs show the available spots, while magnetometers detect the motion of the aircraft. An ESP8266 then instructs a media server to connect to the appropriate livestream, which is subsequently displayed on the TV screen.
All of this is clever enough already, but [Alex] decided to go one step further and added a thermal sensor that detects the location of any persons standing near the display and shifts the image a little when they move. This simulates the perspective of looking out a real window, and should give the image a more life-like quality than if it were simply static.
The whole design is available on [Alex]’s GitHub page, ready to be replicated by anyone who wants to look out over some exotic location. If, instead, you want a way to reminisce about the places you’ve visited in the past, check out this cool souvenir globe. We’ve also seen a neat Google Maps based one a few years back.
Thanks to [Itay] for the tip.
Very clever project! Really like what you’ve done!
Very slick. Thanks.
Cool, if I open the window can I crawl out into the place I’m viewing?
yep. But be careful and remember your window so you can come back. Otherwise you have to try one by one… In Tokyo this will take time :)
This application ought to be done with light field technology. I can’t wait until the discipline matures and things like this would be possible.
With the amount of random IP cameras out there, with the right google scraper, this could be set to randomly jump around the world and display live feeds.
I’ve always wanted my own Iconian gateway
I second that. This project really has some Iconian flair to it. 😎
I wish it was a proper Iconian gateway – would make international travel a lot easier ;)
This is a wonderful project, IMHO. Kudos. 🙂
I must admit, though, the use of magneto meters (?) did confuse the hell out of me for a moment.
Not in a bad way, though, it just was mindblowing to me. Too advanced or sophisticated, if you will.
Because, I was assuming reed relays. My 90s era tinkerer’s mind would have done this task with some reed relays and pull-up/pull-down resistors that connect to some of the microcontroller’s free pins each.
Anyway, this is not meant as a critique. These sensors here are fine. I just didn’t expect them.
I don’t think reed relays would be sensitive enough to go through the layers of the map to be honest, since the magnetic field has to go through a steel sheet (which holds the plane to the map) – Hall Effect sensors/magnetometers are pretty cheap too – https://www.amazon.co.uk/WINGONEER-Effect-KY-003-Magnetic-Arduino/dp/B06XHG9CYN/
This reminds me…
Back during the wall poster craze of the 1970s, there was set of 3 posters showing the same window,
One poster showed an underwater scene with a SCUBA diver,
Another showed a jet aircraft heading straight for the window,
and the 3rd, showed another window into a room with a woman disrobing.
(My dad would’ve killed me if I’d bought that one!)
What about youtube ads? And power saving?
Someone else did the person tracking with xbox kinect, has better range.