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

technology

[spotlight2k3]

the things we can do with thousands of simple objects.

Zit Popping

[beacher]

Nothing like trying to pop a zit in a mirror that looks like it's 2 DPI. On the flip side, when it hits the mirror, you REALLY know it.
-B

Thats just great!

[fiftyLou]

Thanks, thanks a hell of a lot, you bastards.

My gf walks into the room and I'm sitting here with a moz download dialog: "Saving 79% of shinyballs.mov"

Re:Thats just great!

[WIAKywbfatw]

Just thank your lucky stars that it wasn't a Slashdot article about polished jugs.

Re:Thats just great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is her last name .jpg or .gif?

Mirror mirror

[duffhuff]

I hope this guy's web server has a mirror or two

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?

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!

Re:Oh my....

[DrRiffic]

thats ok, it's a mirror

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

[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.

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.

Re:I like the wooden better

[Xzzy]

I was considering doing something like this, except with little beams of light like lasers or something. The beams would be aimed at a photosensitive plate that left a residual glow, which is what the end user sees.

I figure if the technology advances enough, we may even be able to pack hundreds of pixels into a single square inch! ;)

I think trying to up the resolution would take away from the artsy feel of the project, and turn it instead into a very poor monitor. The act of watching the wood chips move is also probably enhanced by their size, and likely quite fun to watch.

That's some pretty legitimate art

[192939495969798999]

Having an art-technology degree myself, I can say that this is some seriously cool art. I would like to see a show where there were a number of different materialed mirror machines.. cool! :)

Now that...

[Faust7]

..has to be the total absolute ultimate whiz-bang pinnacle of lo-res graphics. Atari 400, eat your heart out!

monochrome super pixelly display?

[ddd2k]

its like deja vu all over again....

Now this is interesting...

[grasshoppa]

This is an interesting application of current technology in facinating ways.

I think we're getting to a point where advancements in technology itself will slow down, but the creativity behind it will fuel new inventions for years to come. /ramble

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: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.

That is a cool art. Something like this is useful

[DRWHOISME]

for outdoor displays like football stadiums.

Mirrored display would be ideal for outdoors.

Mirror, Mirror?

[User 956]

So... can it display a picture of evil Spock, with a moustache and a goatee?

Sense of being in a room with it.

[mattkime]

This just isn't something that is communicated well over the web.

Over time, it tends to serve a function more like having a small waterfall in the room - it adds a sense of life.

At first when people see it, they do the usual thing of walking up to it and moving back and forth in front of it. (Dance! Dance!) The entertainment value in this is quite small and wears off quickly.

Yet when people stop looking at it and live with it there is still the background noise and movement which serves to soften the environment and make it feel more alive. I find this to be the most satisfying part of the piece.

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.

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?

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.

Nice to see geeks branching out

[whatch durrin]

It's always nice to see technology applied to art.

Ok, so it's not cutting edge stuff, but it sure does beat some of the dry, mundane applications we engineers use technology for on a daily basis.

On the other hand, engineers sometimes get more of an emotion from opening a control cabinet and seeing all the components neatly laid out, the wires nicely routed through ductwork, and little blinky LEDs. Not that I would, but...

Re:What happens

[Anonymous Coward]

It would attain self realization. Shortly after it would begin making plans to overthrow humanity. I for one welcome our new shiny mirror ball masters.

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?