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Fun With Transparent Screen Backgrounds
herberts writes "Looks like the amusement factor of 'transparent' screen background is getting bigger and bigger. The french Mac fan site Mac Bidouille opened up a dedicated part of their web site where fans can post shots of their transparent backgrounds." Other great transparent background shots can be found at Flickr.
.... They take a picture, put it as their backround, and then put the computer where the picture was taken. You seriously didn't figure that out?
Which is the reason why most of these are laptops or TFT Screens.
Much more painful to pick up CRT and take a picture. I know I don't want to move my 19" monster anywhere...
Coral cache
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I think that's how most were done, but it looks like a few may ghave been "done" by taking a picture, putting the monitor in place and putting a solid color on the background (with icons and such on top of that) and then taking a picture of that. The second picture was then merged with the first in Photoshop or a similar application by effects that mimic cromakey. The picture is only a picture, the actual view never existed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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A few pointers I figured out along the way:
- It's very important to keep the camera angle the same. If you've got a tripod, this is a good time to use it.
- Shooting perpendicular to the display (i.e. not at any sort of angle) is the simplest way of making things line up properly, since you don't have to stretch the backgrounds for perspective or whatever. (Some of the shots in the gallery are at angles and are very impressive in terms of difficulty.)
- Backgrounds with lots of stuff in them look cooler than "gosh, the wall shows behind the computer" in most cases. Elements that extend from behind the screen, or wrap around to the side or front can also be fun.
Next time I'm really bored, I'll try to work up something that has a mirror in it...Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Hey, does images are staged, and there is more than one way to stage them:
Since you can use a screen saver as a desktop background, all you would need to do is write a screen saver that displays whatever the video camera sees. Probably need to use the Quicktime Framework to connect to a DV device?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It *kind of* worked, not that well though. On the basis that it was hacked up in a day for a low-budget TV programme, it was pretty good.
I wouldn't say the US military had the monopoly on developing cool stuff. Can they even afford to, these days?
The Flickr link in the story only links to one person's photoset (no disrespect to that person, w00kie). The Transparent Screens group pool is much more interesting as it aggregates everyones transparent screen photos.
AFAIK a colour LCD works by tiny colour filters in front of the subpixels. That would probably spoil the transparency, in case you remove the backlight. Even if the colouring effects would even out on the average, the fact that the colour filters pass through only one third of the light. would make anything behind the screen appear dark. And I bet t hat the colour display would look like crap when you don't have any kind of backlighting beyond whatever random lights and colours there are behind your screen.
Here it is. includes pictures
-- Why keep us waiting? We are not made of time.
My first try is available at Macbidouille and I wanted to say how these things are TRULY done, not some wild guessing/oversimplification/cheesy head-on way out.
Depending on your patience level, this technique works for as many levels of transparency as you'd like to fake.
--Great Designers, Great Design.
My post has a link to one I did with extreme angle.
Here is the image with the illusion broken. Enjoy.
--
Great Designers, Great Design.
Many of those Picasso pretenders produced complete garbage that was all but indistinguishable from the scrawlings of a 5-year old. Some of them were probably complete frauds who couldn't draw to save their life, but used 'surrealism' as an excuse to produce garbage with a high price tag. Others would have been otherwise good artists, but didn't understand what Picasso was doing, and so ended up with pale imitations of his work.
There were some who could understand what Picasso was doing, and how he was doing it (more or less). These people were able to properly follow in the style and produce good surrealist art. I get a sense that many of them got swallowed up in a larger pool of garbage.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
First off, the likelyhood of breaking a CRT tube is pretty unlikely -- there is some pretty thick glass in there.
Second, there is high voltage in the tube, but as long as you are not poking around in there with a screwdriver while it is on, you are pretty safe. In fact, on every CRT that I've opened, there is usually a sticker with an arrow that says "High Voltage". As long as you're not poking there, and the power is off, you are safe.
Third, most CRTs these days have what is called a discharge circuit -- when the monitor/TV is turned off, the high voltage is quickly discharged.
Fourth, as for gas, there is no gas in a CRT. In fact, there is nothing at all -- it's a vaccum. If there was any gas in a CRT (including oxygen), the CRT wouldn't even work at all.
If you don't believe me, at least look it up -- your library probably has a book or two that talks about CRTs (maybe a TV repair book, or something like that). If you don't want to go look at the library, try looking on Goolge or the wiki.