Electrodes Turn Your Eyelids Into 3D Shutter Glasses

January 16, 2011 by Mike Szczys 153 Comments

[Jonathan Post] has a way to watch 3D video without wearing shutter glasses but it might be kind of a hard product to break into the market. As you can see above, a pair of electrodes are stuck on a viewer’s eyelids, using electricity to alternately close each eye. The video after the break shows a demonstration of this technology. Obviously a camera can’t capture the image that the viewer sees, but this man describes a perfect 3D image. This reminds us of those ab exercisers that use electrodes to stimulate the muscles. Do you think a 3 hour epic would leave your eyelids tired and sore, eventually resulting and a steroid-esque muscle-ridden face?

Edit from [Caleb]: Judging from the comments, some people believe this to be an absolute impossibility. While we concur that this example is pretty silly (what’s powering those electrodes?), we invite you to watch [Daito Manabe]’s facial electrodes fun.

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Macintosh Plus DJ Helmet With An IPad

January 14, 2011 by James Munns 39 Comments

Elaborate helmets are not a new concept, with many famous artists such as Daft Punk and Deadmau5 using them for stage shows. For a sculpture class, [Terrence] fashioned his own out of the body of a Macintosh Plus and an iPad conveniently sourced from eBay. After gutting the insides, the Mac Plus was fitted with parts from a helmet both for comfort as well as for keeping the whole setup head mounted. For additional eye candy, an LED visualizer was affixed below the iPad display. The rig is remotely controlled by a bluetooth keyboard, just for good measure. We think this setup easily stands up to other Daft Punk-esque style head mounts.

Be sure not to miss the video of the helmet featuring DJ Chameleon (a friend of [Terrence]) in action, as well as a number of other photos.

[Edit: Thanks to everyone who caught the Mac Plus/Pro error!]

Open Source Your Rave With OpenLase

January 14, 2011 by James Munns 26 Comments

Without a doubt, Laser Projectors are a great way to project large, bright images on any surface you can imagine. With a high enough quality projector and software package, excellent images and visualizations can be displayed in real time. [marcan], of the openkinect project, decided that there were not any open source laser projection packages out there that suited his wants or needs, so logically he decided to write his own. Because home-made laser projectors often use the audio out port of a PC, building the framework on top of the JACK unix sound software to control the hardware made perfect sense. OpenLase includes plugins for audio visualizations, 2D and 3D gaming, as well as converting video streams into laser format in real time.

Be sure to check out the Chaos Communication Congress presentation [marcan] gave after the break, as well as all the extra demo videos on his website.

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VGA Interfacing AVR Microcontrollers

November 23, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 34 Comments

[Lucidscience] is back again, this time showing us how to push data to a VGA monitor from your AVR project. It turns out that it is pretty simple, requiring only n open port and a few resistors and diodes. Well, it is that simple for the most basic version which gives you 56×60 pixels. Of course he couldn’t live with that and had to expand. Version 2 outputs 240×240 resolution and has additional sram and a double buffer making animations smoother and flicker free. As usual, the project is quite well documented with photos of the entire build process and schematics for you to build your own. A video of version 1 and version 2 are available after the break.

[via HackedGadgets]

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Key Chain LCD As Screen For A Dockstar

November 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Peter Gunn] added an LCD screen to his Dockstar. Now that we think of it, this really shouldn’t be all that hard since the Dockstar can run a Linux kernel and it has USB ports. [Peter] took inspiration from [Sprite_TM’s] key chain LCD4Linux hack that we looked at many moons ago. He used a cheap Coby DP182 digital picture frame that can be picked up for less than $5 used. A bit of firmware hacking and LCD4Linux has no problem pushing images to the device via USB. [Peter’s] setup refreshes the screen at one frame per second, but if all you need is a bit of feedback from the otherwise headless system this is a great solution.

[Thanks Mikka]

CRT Art: Wobbulator

November 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

The Wobbulator is a black and white CRT television that has additional hardware to manipulate the electrons as they bombard the phosphor layer of the screen. It was created by [June Paik] and you can find it at The Experimental Television Center. [Blair Neal] took some time to share the background information and some video on this interesting device.

The television has a second ”yoke” of coils around the ray tube. The TV still functions normally with these coils installed, but running a signal through them can further manipulate the picture. Hook, them up to a function generator and you can get some pretty wild effects. In this case, the signals from a sound generator are controlling the coils, resulting in the audio/video artwork which you can view after the break.

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Rendering A 3D Environment From Kinect Video

November 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 76 Comments

[Oliver Kreylos] is using an Xbox Kinect to render 3D environments from real-time video. In other words, he takes the video feed from the Kinect and runs it through some C++ software he wrote to index the pixels in a 3D space that can be manipulated as it plays back. The image above is the result of the Kinect recording video by looking at [Oliver] from his right side. He’s moved the viewer’s playback perspective to be above and in front of him. Part of his body is missing and there is a black shadow because the camera cannot see these areas from its perspective. This is very similar to the real-time 3D scanning we’ve seen in the past, but the hardware and software combination make this a snap to reproduce. Get the source code from his page linked at the top and don’t miss his demo video after the break.

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