If you ever make it to DNA Pizza in San Francisco, you may feel as though you’re being watched. The Eye of the Pizza is Upon You. Or, it was, until the out-of-production and now very expensive spherical projector gave up the ghost during a power outage. It’s back, though! Thanks to proprietor [Jamie Zawinski] and some cheap, absolutely-not-supposed-to-be-in-there replacement parts.
The saga started long ago, back in 2017, when [Jamie] got ahold of a Gekkin WorldEye hemispherical projector. It looks like those were meant for the educational market, to show planets and the like, but [Jamie] instead put a big eye on it, thanks in part to work by [PaintYourDragon]. It looked great, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. There it sat, staring down patrons for nine long years, until the power company did what is known in the business as “an oopsie” and turned the WorldEye into an expensive paperweight.
Not to be deterred, [Jamie] got the cheapest projector he could find and an equally-bargain-bin fisheye lens originally meant for macro photography, and mashed them into the Gekkin case without a care for such fripperies as focal length. A little surgery later, and as [Jamie] puts it, “The Eye of Pizza is, Once Again, Upon You”. In spite of the projector being 16:9, thus not quite projecting across the whole surface of the dome and the image fuzzing a touch at the edges, the result works far better than it should for the amount of engineering that went into it. [Jamie] expects further improvements can come from tweaking the image on the software side, but it looks like the current iteration is good enough for pizza parlor decor.
We’ve featured another of [Jamie]’s hacks before, when he built a Linux payphone. Weirdly enough, this isn’t the first time the WorldEye has received a projector transplant around here.
I have one of these sitting in my storage unit. I had no idea they were valuable. I’ll have to look into that!
Value lies in the eye of the beholder.
There’s a DnD pun in there about beholders but I lack the depth of lore knowledge to make it.
I think they’ve all been made, since “Eye of the Beholder” was even used as the title of a 1980s (or early 1990s?) D&D dungeon crawler video game.
It was 1991.
i see what you did there. and, punctuation helps a lot:
value lies! ( in the ai of the beeholder)
:)
JWZ, for those not in the know, is most recognizable as one of the developers of the Mozilla browser, predecessor to Firefox. (He also wrote XScreensaver and a bunch of other free software.)
Is he still blocking visitors to his blog who aren’t using an OS on his approved list (i.e. not Win7)? With the excuse that only a Chinese scammer would still be using Win7 these days?
I find all that especially ironic given his history with and the side he chose to fight for in the Browser Wars. I guess it’s true that people get more conservative with age?
Uh, to clarify… I mean, anything other than Win7. Not that he blocked non-Win7 users. I really need an edit button. Or at least preview. Or a sharper brain. All of the above, let’s go with that.
Now, what I want to see are dedicated nacelle domes for TOS U.S.S. Enterprise models.
Lighting kits are busy electromechanical deals, or just simple lights.
Having dedicated round, smartphone-ish screens with repeating patterns would be nice…hook to an accelerometer so as it is whooshed backwards–it spins in reverse, or both “rotors” spin the same direction when it turns–etc.
Techmoan reviewed one of these things years ago, if anyone wants to see how one works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcG9O6S6cOU
THEY LIVE WE SLEEP!
How can these be so expensive? No one cloned them? I’ll gladly buy two of them for a silly project but not if it’s that expensive.
“Pizza Eye Surgery Saves” is the new “Correct Horse Battery Staple”
https://xkcd.com/936/
Not “Gekkin” – Gakken.