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

Pretty cool

[Anonymous Coward]

this is a pretty cool art project, good to see examples of technology creating art, or is that art creating technology

very cool

[squarefish]

but it's funny how mechanical the description is- the details are more industrial then I had expected. the acutal sound of the machine gave me the first impression of nuematics in action- I"ve worked in the paste with several different nuematic systems and I honestly thought the activity of the balls represented a nuematic system also.

so, when will they create an 'over the bed' version of this?

I like the wooden better

[mnmn]

Im thinking it might be nice to build a much higher res version of the wooden mirror with each woodchip being say 5mm^ so it really looks like a monochrome mirror. Instead of attaching 8 motors to each MCU, you can use a 32-bit MCU and address ALL the motors using the big addressing range and a fast multiplexer. That will allow minimization of the whole structure.

For the motors, the 'electronic muscle' available from jameco.com can be used for cheapicity and simplicity, again to increase the resolution rather than expensive motors.

Four of them can be lined against an elevator wall to seriously impress or scare patrons. Better still make one of them a mirror and display Evil Dead on the other three starting at 2 am. Make sure a hidden camera records the reactions.

Now I wanna make one.

Re:I like the wooden better

[cybermace5]

He's using RC servos and lots of microcontrollers because he has to provide a PWM signal for each servo. That enables him to set a grayscale level instead of on-off. Nitinol 'muscle wire' is a little more difficult to set to a length other than 'short' (spring tension brings it back). Also, the servos will stay in one spot even when they are receiving no PWM signal. A nitinol wire would need constant PWM to hold a position against the return spring.

Granted, he probably could do with less microcontrollers and a creative strobing scheme to activate rows of servos in turn. But that would be difficult to get right, and might not be as responsive.

That is a cool art. Something like this is useful

[DRWHOISME]

for outdoor displays like football stadiums.

Mirrored display would be ideal for outdoors.

Re:Multi-Channel motion control

[cybermace5]

$8,000 dollars for the servo motors alone, the cheapest I can find. I'm sure if you were ordering 900 you could get a discount. The rest of it looks like about 450 feet of aluminum tubing, 10,800 feet of wire, some black paint, about 32 microcontrollers, a PC, and a video camera. And of course, 900 chrome-plated balls, which I'm not sure where to find. Really cheap plastic stick-shift knobs?

Wasn't cheap, but probably less than a new car. Not counting labor, of course.

I prefer the wooden mirror.

[JoeGee]

It seems more organic, in its frame it looks almost like a piece of furniture. To me it looks like something you'd see in a wizard's study. Just from the movie the sound was neat, it must be amazing in real life.

Do you know where the wooden mirror is located?

Updated/interactive version of pinscreen animation

[mehu]

This is nothing new- basically pinscreen animation (the first of which, Night on Bald Mountain, was made by inventor Alexander Alexeieff in 1933) with much larger "pixels", using chrome balls instead of pins, and much lower resolution. Actual pinscreen animations like Mindscape have a much higher resolution, and look almost like lithographs.

Of course, images on the pinscreen have to be manually "drawn" in using rollers & hand tools, which takes a considerable amount of time.

(IAAAM - I Am An Animation Major)

recursive mirroring.

[Ompaloskeptic]

That's amazingly cool. It's a bit of a double mirror. It's reflective, and then you can point the image capture at you and have it shaped like you while you''re looking at the reflection of you in the balls. I wonder if we can figure out a way to get any more ways of mirroring involved there. What would happen if you pointed the camera at the mirror itself?