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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.
For a CRT could you draw the electron gun and circuits.
I did it on my linux machine too! It's nice and transparent, although I suck at perspective.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
I am more amused by putting a camera pointing at my screen over my shoulder and using that as my live wallpaper. That whole endless hall of mirror effect amuses me greatly.
:)
Usually I'm just happy to play the movie I'm watching on my desktop though. A DVD Jukebox effect that plays nonstop is a great root window IMO.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Many folks are claiming the easy routes:
A) Take a picture, and move the screen where the picture was.
The problem with this is perspective. lenses are not flat scans of the world, and you'll see (in fact in some of the shots you do see) some perspective distortion, especially with stuff like vertical lines.
B)Take picture with and without screen and photochop it.
Actually, the best non-cheating way to do this is:
C)
1) Set your camera up on a tripod, at the scene where you want your monitor.
2) Remove monitor.
3) Take picture.
4) replace montor.
5) Take another picture.
up to here this is the same as method B), the photochopping. But instead of pasting the background (And cheating), you crop the first photo to the dimensions of the monitor in the second photo.
6) Set the cropped picture as background.
7) Take the money shot.
8) Wait for the pulitzer folks to get back to you.
It'd be cool if the transparency showed the inside of the monitor!
Back a few years, IBM sold a laptop where you could detach the back cover of the lid, exposing the screen so that it could be placed on an overhead projector. I worked with Ted Selker who invented it, so I had a homemade prototype version. When I presented at conferences and everyone else struggled with F7 and video formats, I just whipped the back off my Thinkpad and put it on top of the overhead projector. I don't think anyone listened to my talk because they were all craning their necks to see what I had done with the display. All of the questions afterward were about where to buy such a nifty device rather than anything about my talk!
The removable back was also useful for working outdoors. You could put a white reflective surface behind the screen and backlight with sunlight, making it usable no matter how bright it was.
For what it's worth, you can get it to very nearly work if you have a distant background, then the error would be minimal.
If you know the distance to the object, you can do a distortion effect (I think a "punch" effect would be right, squeeze the center out towards the sides). That'd only work if the objects stays at a fairly fixed distance, if you have a glass window to the hallway you should be able to see people walking by just as if it was transparent.
If you wanted to make a really advanced variety, you could measure the distance by e.g. IR pulses or something and dynamicly apply the effect with different settings. That should work until you get as close as the camera can see (the camera must see what you would've seen in the upper left corner).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just wait until OLED's are scaled up to a larger size and you will be able to have transparent backgrounds without the need for a digital camera.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It's a little disconcerting to see that no one has posted that Belgian surrealistic artist Rene Magritte did these type of images (painted canvas displaying background) back in the 1920s.
Don't you guys ever look through those big books of surrealistic art in bookstores and libraries? Much of the imagery that we consider 'weird' and 'futuristic' now was first conceived and painted back in the 1920s and 30s. Guys like Salvadore Dali, Yves Tanguy, Joan ('Ho-ahn') Miro, Max Ernst, and Rene Magritte created the modern fantasy landscape look.
Their work was a step beyond the inflamed, blood-soaked, passionate, and sex-obsessed imagery of the 19th century Decadent Romanticists like Gustave Moreau, Klimt, and DeVille. It was this over-stimulated buffoonery led to the disaster of the Great War. Surrealism was an attempt to invoke the primal mental forces that lay beneath duty, religion, and even consciousness.
Since you'all have broadband you can find this images and paintings easily on the web. They are definitely worth the trouble to find and view them.