Stylin’ HMD

July 8, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 22 Comments

Watch out, these sunglasses are actually a head mounted display. [Staffan] says he’s wanted dataglasses since ’95, but whats currently out there makes the user look ridiculous, and we have to agree. While his forum posts are a little lacking in detail, he’s promised us more info soon. And for now lets us know at least the resolution, well sort of: Its either 480×1280 or 480x427x3, you can be the judge. Update: [Staffan] has clarified “The resolution is 480*1280 true pixels. It is accomplished by spanning the screen across two Kopin CyberDisplay VGA modules.”

Regardless, [Staffan] is looking for help perfecting the glasses, with what in particular we’re not sure, but the project looks promising and we hope he keeps up the good work.

Multi-layer Display Uses Water Instead Of Screen

July 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

This multi-layer display uses droplets of water as a projection medium. This way, several different projected areas can be seen for a not-quite-3D layering effect. The trick is in syncing up all aspects of the apparatus. There are three manifolds, each with 50 stainless steel needles for water drop production. A solenoid valve actuates the drops, a camera images them mid-air, and a computer syncs the images of the dots with a projector. In the video after the break you can see the SIGGRAPH 2010 presentation that includes a description of the process as well as action shots including a 3-layer version of Tetris.

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Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, Face Detection Scripts

June 27, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 19 Comments

Straight out of Ghost in the Shell, the Laughing Man makes his appearance in these security camera shots. [William Riggins] wrote us to let us know about his teams Famicam scripts. After taking a screen shot, faces are detected and counted, ‘anonymized’, and the final image is uploaded to Twitter.

The process is rather simple, and sure beats wearing a bunch of white reflective camouflage. All that’s left is detecting specific faces to make anonymous, and of course uploading the script to every camera in the world. Easy, right?

Unwrapping 360 Degree Video

June 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[Golan Levin] found a way to unwrap the 360 degree images he created with his camera. He’s using a Sony Bloggie HD camera which comes with a 360 degree attachment for the lens. This produces a donut shaped image (seen in the upper left) that was not all that palatable to [Golan]. He used Processing and openFrameworks to create a program that lets him unwrap the donut into a flat image, or create a ring of video where the viewer is at the center and can scroll left or right to see the rest of the filmed environment. He released the source so you can adapt the program if you’re using a different 360 video setup.

[Thanks Kyle]

Human Tetris: Object Tracking On An 8-bit Microcontroller

May 15, 2010 by Phil Burgess 13 Comments

Elaborating on an item previously mentioned among last weekend’s Cornell final projects list, this time with video:

For their ECE final project, [Adam Papamarcos] and [Kerran Flanagan] implemented a real-time video object tracking system centered around an ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller. Their board ingests an NTSC video camera feed, samples frames at a coarse 39×60 pixel resolution (sufficient for simple games), processes the input to recognize objects and then drives a TV output using the OSD display chip from a video camera (this chip also recognizes the horizontal and vertical sync pulses from the input video signal, which the CPU uses to synchronize the digitizing step). Pretty amazing work all around.

Sometimes clever projects online are scant on information…but as this is their final grade, they’ve left no detail to speculation. Along with a great explanation of the system and its specific challenges, there’s complete source code, schematics, a parts list, the whole nine yards. Come on, guys! You’re making the rest of us look bad… Videos after the break…

[G’day Bruce]

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Mechanical Scanning Television

April 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

This project explores the early days of television. Above you see a view from the back side of a mechanically scanning television. The black disk spins and the holes, aligned in a spiral pattern, create vertical scan lines for projected light to shine through. In this case, [Eckhard Etzold] is using red, green, and blue LEDs to create a color picture. As you can seen in the video after the break it does a pretty good job. The main problem being that the scanning disc on a mechanical TV has to be much larger than the actual image. How big would the disk need to be and how fast would it spin to produce a forty inch image? We still think this is a better method than transmitting video data in parallel.

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Trash Heap Projector

March 29, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5jymxi62RI]

Being hackers, sometimes we just want to hack something together, not engineer it. This projector is a great example. Made mostly out of cardboard and duct tape (or duck tape if you prefer). He picked up a 12v LED array, a cheap fresnel lens, an LCD from a “back up monitor” and a focusing lens taken from a magnifying glass. Sure, we’ve seen better, much better. But seeing an evenings worth of feverish wire twisting and taping is always pleasant. It may look pretty dim in the video, it may be as well, but keep in mind that it is common for them to appear much brighter in person or if shot with a night setting on a digital camera.