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.

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!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is her last name .jpg or .gif?

Mirror mirror

[duffhuff]

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.