Mirror, Mirror

PSaltyDS writes "A friend forwarded this to me... don't know where he got it from. Daniel Rozin, Director Of Research and adjunct professor at ITP, Tisch School Of The Arts, NYU, and owner of SmoothWare Design, has built a Mirror-like display as an art project out of shiny balls. This seems to be a refinement of a 1999 Wooden Mirror project that is also pretty cool."

Comments

donkey mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

heres a mirror (no pun intended)

donkey network
ed2k://|file|shinyballs.mov|18268899|55AC 7A46537F8 88102EE73772D204675|/

Re:I like the wooden better

[Alien Being]

It looks like muscle wire would be to slow. Max cycle rate seems to be about 1/second. Electromagnets would probably work better, like those green flip-dot highway signs.

Multi-Channel motion control

[somethinsfishy]

His system has one motor per "pixel". To produce the grey scale, he has to treat each pixel as an axis of position control. the two ways this is usually done is with servo's can do this with position feedback on the load (ala model-airplane servos), or with steppers which can be more finicky, but requre no feedback sensor. In either case, it wasn't trivial to build all the "pixels" and then get them under control. I'll bet it wasn't cheap either.

Re:very cool

[cybermace5]

Pneumatics would be one way of doing it, but servo valves are expensive and that's a lotta tubes!

I'm positive they used RC airplane servos with a rod from the bellcrank to the ball. That's how they got such fluid and fast motion. You can pick up servos from Servo City for less than nine bucks each. They are pretty simple to control with a microcontroller as well. I'm impressed with the wiring behind the display...what a nightmare!

Trash Mirror

[Akai]

I saw his Trash Mirror at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Very cool installation, and a wonderful geek-friendly museum, worth the visit if your from or in NYC.

Re:I prefer the wooden mirror.

[mattkime]

721 Broadway

I lived in that building for three years studying photography just a couple of floors up. Once for a class we took a peak at the projects on that floor. Overall, its hard to tell whether the robots or grad students are winning.

During the dot com boom, studying there was seen as a way to catapult yourself into a higher tax bracket. I doubt thats true anymore.