Makerbot Clone

April 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

This table-top extruder was modeled after the Makerbot. Instead of laser-cut wood this is built from acrylic, uses salvaged rods from laser printers, some inexpensive stepper motors, and a homemade extruder. All said and done, [Peter Jansen] figures this build came in somewhere around $200-300. It may not look as nice, but at half the price of the Makerbot base kit you also get the fun of building from scratch. Hopefully your fabrication skills are up to the challenge. If so, you’ll be printing useful items soon enough.

I’m One Step Closer To Azeroth

April 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

While looking for a way to injure his neck and live in the World of Warcraft all at once, [Gavan Woolery] came up with the idea for this virtual reality setup. That monitor, residing just inches from his eyes, is putting out 1080p at 120Hz. His plan is to pair up the motion sensing seen in the video after the break with an NVIDIA 3D Vision Kit for something close to total immersion.

To be fair, [Gavan] never mentions WoW, but we all know where this is going right?

Continue reading “I’m One Step Closer To Azeroth” →

Ditch The LPs And Build Your Own 3D Scanner

March 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

Find yourself an old record player, a laser level, and a digital scanner and you can build a 3D scanner. That’s what [Rob] did. The camera and laser level are mounted on the turntable for steady rotation. The camera captures the vertical laser line traveling around the room by recording 30 fps at a resolution of 640×480. This data is then translated into a Blender 3D file via a Python script and the Python Image Library. You can scan a whole room or just a small object. The face above is the result of this image capture after a bit of processing. [Rob] found this worked best in the dark and when scanning surfaces that are not reflective.

Make sure you also check out the camera-and-projector scanning method.

3D Printing On A Much Larger Scale

March 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 44 Comments

The end goal of this giant rapid prototyping machine is to print buildings. We’re not holding our breath for a brand new Flintstones-esque abode, but their whimsical suggesting of printed buildings on the moon seems like science fiction with potential. The machine operates similar to a RepRap but instead of plastic parts, it prints stone by binding sand with epoxy. This method is not revolutionary, but hasn’t really been seen in applications larger than a square meter or so. It’s fun to see the things we dabble in heading for industrial production applications.

[Thanks Juan]

Home Cinema 3D (or Just Tick Off Theatergoers)

March 4, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 55 Comments

After a visit to the local theater and discovering the use of IR 3D glasses (for films such as Avatar), the team over at Furrtek wondered how they worked, and more importantly, how the glasses could be manipulated to tick off audience members. While the original intentions seem a bit childish, they did mention that their final setup could also be used for a home cinema with IR 3D glasses.

Onto the good stuff: the glasses receive IR light pulses timed with the movie to black out the appropriate eye with the appropriate frame and producing a 3D effect. With the use of IR Investigator the team grabbed said timings; it was then simply a matter of building their own IR projector, and bringing it back to the theater to annoy the crowd setting it up for their 3D home cinema.

Fujifilm 3D Camera

January 10, 2010 by James Munns 22 Comments

There have been a couple companies that have shown off full-sized 3D displays, but Fujifilm had a couple of products that caught my eye. The first was a stereoscopic camera called the Finepix Real 3D W1 that not only functioned as a 3D Camera, but also featured a glasses-free 3D display on the back. The camera was capable of using the separate cameras in different functions, allowing you to zoom one in, and take a wide angle with the other simultaneously.

They featured a miniature 3D display as well, which was the size of a regular digital photo frame but contained the same technology as the camera screen. As far as getting into hacking a 3D display, this would be a good place to start, though the ~$400 price might be a bit of a put off.

CES: 3d Tv, Without Glasses

January 9, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7eNMCPJe_Q]

We were hoping to get to test drive some of the 3d televisions that don’t need glasses. We had speculated about how they worked, and we were mostly right. It appears to be some type of lens that works similar to those little printed holograms. The strange thing is that we haven’t seen any of these TVs in the big name booths. The few that we have seen are in little booths at the edges. The big names are usually doing the polarized glasses or shutter glasses.

“it was nice not wearing glasses”… yeah, I know, I’m wearing glasses.