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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.
Or something more techno-cool?
This should take about ten seconds
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Would be a fun way to freak out the uninformed and techincally challanged.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Cool dude, but how do I mod a 21" crt like this?
But also very transient- move the computer, or just look at it from another angle, and the effect is destroyed.
And it has to be said: These people have way too much time on their hands!
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
how do they do it ? is it just a trick ?
I for one can see right through them.
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
For a CRT could you draw the electron gun and circuits.
Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.
Actually, this guy almost has his hands on the time.
AhahaHAHAHAHahahahaha I am so, so sorry.
This just in:
Microsoft has announced that they will be building technology for Transparent Desktops into their next-generation operating-system, Longhorn. Microsoft representatives report that this technology involves cutting the back out of the monitor to allow the image behind it to show through. When asked whether this would impede the monitor's ability to display images, Microsoft replied that this was an issue that will be addressed in SP1.
It looks like these are all staged. They look pretty cool but I'd be a damn site more impressed if if could be done "live" with a webcam behind the monitor... :-)
I downloaded one of the pictures and put it on my desktop, and it totally didn't look transparent at all.
Lame. And it's probably smaller than a Nomad.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Do it with an USB camera and you can have an ever changing background. Setup it up to take a snapshot
every couple of minutes. So it will look right even when you move the computer.
-M
What they need is a built-in webcam like Sony's Vaio TR3A, a flippable camera in the top centre of the monitor, and do a full screen live-feed.
Then you'll be able to move the laptop to anywhere and the screen will still look transparent.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I guess I'll come back and check it out in a day or so. :)
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."
Coral cache
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
You posted a friggin' IMAGE GALLERY on the FRONT PAGE of SLASHDOT??
Whaddaya wanna do, KILL 'EM??
Now what I want to see is a setup with an iSight mounted to the back of the montors with a nice wide angle lens attached.
Use some nice altivec magic to transform that realtime image and then make that the desktop background. Only then will I be satisfied that I have a "transparent" desktop.
Sipping on Jolt and Dew. Laid back. With my mind of my cubicle and my cubicle on my mind.
but the last image in the gallery. /.'ed right before I could load the last one. Almost like a wall, so sudden, so sad.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
This, the Apple Easter Egg post, and the PSP post, signify a typical weekend of stories around here. Sigh.
Before the corporate buyout, Slashdot would have posted cool stories all the time no matter the day. But since OSTG took over, they save the good stories for weekdays just because they know they'll get more adviews on a Monday. Blah!
I was hoping that the BGs were inside shots of the CRTs or detailed views of LCD panels rather than illusions of the room which only work from one angle. However, I am reminded of the transparent skirts.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
These look extremely good when you set them up and then snap the result BUT they do not look any good at all or convincing when you try it in real life. I know because I'm so sad I tried it on Friday when this story first came out on gizmodo.com or engadget.com (always get those mixed up). If you really want to have a go remember:
1) You really need to use a laptop because shifting a CRT monitor or even an LCD panel is tough, flicking it down is easy.
2) Try to match the resolution of the camera to the screen size otherwise you'll have to stretch it to get it to fit right. Even then it won't look right because it only looks right from one position.
3) Get a app that lets you tint and alter the gamma of the photos. My digital camera's white balance just didn't create the same yucky yellow tint that my office strip lights have. Couldn't match it at all.
4) Admit that honestly, if what's behind your PC monitor is a dusty cube wall it's probably not worth looking at anyway, and no, you won't fool anyone.
Here is my quick attempt. Some of the ones out there are really neat, especially the one has three screens overlapping on flickr. I thought it would be fun to do one of these, and then GIMP something into the image. Have my PowerBook looking out the window, and then GIMP a picture of the Eiffel Tower off in the distance. I'm too lazy, but someone else could do it :)
I looked at the pics and some of them look really cool, but is this really "news for nerds"? Is this tech news?
The websites are extremely image-intensive, so I expect them to bulge any second now. Here's the story:
* Take a picture of the background where the computer normally resides
* Put said image on computer desktop
* place the computer so that the background image blends in with reality
* Take another picture, one that shows your computer with a "transparent" background
* Upload said picture to a "Transparent Background Website"
* ???
* Profit? ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Slashdotted website.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Great - now I can stare some more at my cubical wall all day long.
Next, someone will figure out a way to tattoo that image onto the inside of my eyelids.
The one with the cat is wicked. I wonder if the color balance changed because of the monitor or because the light in the room changed.
Have you seen my stapler?
It would be cooler if somehow the background image was dynamic depending up the angle between you and the monitor, so tilting your head to the left doesn't ruin the effect.
Which really sucks for those of us in other timezones who have to work on weekends (~5pm Sunday here). Soo bored.
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.
Any idiot can merge two layers together in Photoshop. The whole point of these images is the work it takes to get the image really on the screen to match as closely as possible to the background...
Find a few that make you suspcious, and I'm sure a lot of people will point out why they were not done in PS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey! it is importante.
Take three pictures and combine them with the 3D Reconstruction of Scenes. Then have a motion-tracking webcam on top of the monitor. Finally, have the background being continuously rendered to follow where the viewer is!
People taking photo of their computer screens reminds me of this project.
Infinite Cat Project
Some people have way to much time on their hands!
What they need to do is have the screen like a hologram. That way when you look at it from different angles it will show a different image. Combine all these and then put them on a fighter jet and you have a stealth fighter! A stealth fighter covered with LCD screens. Yes, I am crazy. Yes, I am tired at 3:16AM.
So what happens when this technology becomes real and your beating off to your neighbor undressing outside your window?
I'm actually typing this live at my work... Which is kind of funny.
:./
For about a year now i've used the overlay mode in the winamp AVS to put trippy backgrounds behind the karaoke lyrics. The overlay mode basically works by replacing a RGB value with the AVS output. Really keen.
I fear clicking the link and RTFA might give me a popup (i'm on the DJ machine, I hate it when a website unexpectedly puts a popup on the karaoke window) But hopefully AVS, and overlays has something to do with transparent backgrounds.
Anyways, all you late night geeks up like I am, Happy easter. If you wanna see what the heck im talkin about, just tune into toqerTV on winamp. Its a nifty transparent background trick with winamp. Stupid hackers took down the server my sig is on
--toq
Is it just me or are the Live Bookmarks for Slashdot and http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/ getting very similar?
this article is 5 days too early
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It looks like a modern version of trompe l'oeil, without all the pesky work involved in learning how to paint.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
could always take a walk, with your laptop.
As a side note, does anyone offer transparent color LCD's? I know transparent black and white LCD's have been available for years now in clocks and other devices. And the luminosity would be terrible, of course. I'm just wondering if such a thing would be technically possible, perhaps with a little creative afterburner-style front lighting.
The ______ Agenda
It'd be cool if the transparency showed the inside of the monitor!
The site is slashdotted. Courtesy of yours truly, here's a photo of a transparent background, reposted here:
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"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Hell, it's not even like in the UK we had a 2am last night. My clock went straight from 1.59am GMT to 3am BST
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
could it be possible to do this for camera equipped mobiles, background changes as it moves etc?
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.
Apparently he does it so people think he's working. Fooled me.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
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?
They'll probably implement the transparent background technology before PNG compatibility in IE.
Meanwhile, by the time they get it working, the OS community will have 16 different implementations of the TDT (Transparent DeskTop) standard, and SVG will have been extended to include it.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I was hoping for wallpapers with alpha channel... More Gnome news please!
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
take webcam, shoot at correct angle, stream on the desktop
{------- webcam {-laptop {------- you
Solution: embed a webcam in the cover of the laptop and then have it auto update to the desktop background :)
if this doesn't shut up all those pragmatists shouting that transparency is just useless eye-candy, then I don't know what will.
Now I can finally stare at the wall all day long.
It was built before overhead projectors were commonly used for showing the words of songs, so they didn't leave anywhere for a screen. Covering the back wall is a big wooden cross -- we used to project words onto the wall on one side of this, but it was cramped and could only be seen from one side.
But recently, someone had a bright idea. We now have a video projector, and a large screen which descends to cover the cross and surrounding design -- when it's not being used for words, they project a picture of what's underneath it. It's not perfect (the alignment and colour are very slightly out), but it's a good solution which allows everyone to see the words without getting rid of the focal point.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
This does not let met see thru the complete monitor.. it make me look at the insides of it !
Not a laptop but a standalone transparent flat panel.
My own transparent screens.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
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.
I just tried this. Problem is, I have a blank wall behind my monitor.
I'm sure that Magritte would have approved: http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Magrit6.html
or a porn website that you can't get rid off.
...to get this, someone on the same floor as me has managed that three times in the last year and a half. Nothing but a full reinstall would clear it, ran anti-virus, spyware cleaners and whatnot but it all came back. Glad I don't do their tech support (not even same company). I tried to help out but seriously - if they asked me to take over, I'd be the admin and noone there would get more than user privs. Not even power user.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
The picture is dependent from the angle you look at the screen, so the system at least has to know your position. Moreover, it is possible that the image you will be seeing is not completely visible by a (one) webcam on the back. Nice idea, though...
Is how crappy colour reproduction is in TFTs these days. Most of those have a blue tint nowhere near the actual background; although some were obviously made that way on purpose, most are just the chopped/lined up shot. I wish that weren't the case (I use TFTs myself), but sadly it is.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
I just opened my CRT, removed my monitor screen, tube and back panel. :O
;)
It looks dark through...
Now what?
j/k
One more detail may be needed: adjusting for the gamma/color of the monitor, in other words, you may need to play with the hue/saturation settings of the picture.
n/t
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
..the reason that we haven't yet come up with a cure for AIDS or cancer is that all of our scientific minds are engaged in activities that far more pressing, such as transparent backgrounds. Just joking, this sh*t's important.
This kind of reminds me of that HP photo/camera commercial, where that fellow snags frames out of the air, capturing screen shots from live motion in the foreground and background with each one he grabs.
I'll have somebody take a picture of me sitting at the computer.
Then I'll take that picture and shrink it to place it within the monitor screen that is within the picture. Repeat. Then I'll make that recursive scene become the screen background.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
I had this virtual-pet thingy once which i got for free somewhere and when i removed the LCD it looked just like regular glass.
Is there anything preventing one from relocating the hardware at the back of an LCD monitor for the same effect?
Just a bit off kilter, but that's ok. Proof of concept works at least. (:
http://www.kredal.com/images/transcraptop.jpg
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Just think how many people I could be filing frivilous lawsuits against today!
Am I the only geek that expected to see backgrounds that showed the insides of the monitors? Hardware is much more exciting than the wall or shelves behind the computer. I can think of some good joke possibilities too along the lines of things or statements that would be funny or shocking if they had been hidden inside your monitor.
Could a video camera be rigged to do this 'live'? If you attached a video camera to the back of the screen, could you pipe the video (some 'reduced' frame of the wider shot to the destkop XWindow. Heck an IR-based-distance-to-wall hack connected to serial that tells you just what proper subset of the video you need (10ft to wall=all the live-video-frame, 1ft to wall=just center 10% of frame scalled to full background window)..
im not an uber-hacker, but i imagine some one who *is* could put this together in an hour or three..?
Boss's PA had a monitor that attached with seperate R G and B BNC cables.
I swapped around the Red and Blue cables and carefully adjusted the colour settings in Windows 98 to swap all the R & B components around so all menus, etc looked normal.
Of course, the moment she started browsing websites all the images loaded wrong.
Took ages for them to figure out what was wrong - video driver reinstalls etc.
Got a written warning for that one, but was worth it!
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Wouldn't this kind of hose your performance? I mean not totally but you might see slowdown when running even one big app?
Freedom: "I won't!"
Neither was the advanced technology warefare demo of "seethrough Camo". But it did passingly good for a Harry Potter'esk invisibility cloak. Actually someone viewed "Preditor" or "Alien vs Preditor" and copied it. Consider this the Alpha 1 prototype.
Author C Clark invented Geosyncronous communication's satellites. He did not get the implementation dead on but could have gotten the patent claims right!
Vista, the single biggest argument for Desktop Linux! It doesn't "Just Work"(TM).
Have you ever considered that there's not much interesting stuff going on with technology any more?
While there is something cool once in awhile, It's highly unlikely that there will be a couple dozen interesting developments every day.
I did this a few years ago in my dorm room at school. Funny thing is, my roommate said then, the same things people are saying now. "Uh, shouldn't you be studying or doing something better with your time...?"
That said, I figured I'd have to share this. I made this a few months ago to show that Visio can make even the simplest task look difficult.
When I showed this to my roommate, he exclaimed "It's that hard?!?"
http://www.tcnj.edu/~pompeli2/pbj.gif
Transparent screens pool
OK, here's the pr0n angle: you send a picture of what's behind the screen (i.e. your bedroom, preferably not a wall a foot away...) to the pr0n site. They shoot live pr0n on a green screen and superimpose it on your background. The pr0n actors can see the superimposed video so they can get in the right positions and not walk through walls, etc. I guess they will need a green bed with green sheets.
Great idea for bachlor parties. Get everyone liquored-up real good first, and see who actually believes it.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Technically, the idea is not new -- Rene Magritte has a series of paintings of this sort. One, for instance, depicts an easel standing in front of a window. The painting on the easel is "transparent" in exactly the same sense. :)
For those who are interested, search for "The Human Condition" (or something like "Le Condition Humaine", if you pardon my French
And when he had opened the fifth seal, i saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the effects. The acorn is the external coating of fat chicks kicking it og style.
Posted about this the other day, adding some ways to extend it:
It would be easy to extend this idea and set up a web cam to stream images of the background to your desktop. It could be full video, but for better performance, I think I'd just prefer using a time delay to keep it current (say, 2 minutes?). That would keep your background up to date with any subtle changes in the background (natural light, movement of objects, etc). Optionally, a motion sensor could be used that would trigger an update every time you tilted your monitor.
Sure, it's nothing but eye candy, but if implemented correctly and efficiently, it could be uber-cool.
One more crazy idea - incorporate two micro-cameras and 3d glasses with a tracking device. This would allow several things. First of all, the objects in the background could really appear to be in the background (and all of your icons/programs/videos could be cooler, too). Also, by monitoring the position of your head in relation to the monitor, the cameras and background image could be shifted to make the illusion of transparency even more complete.
Implementing this would definitely be worth ultra-double bonus points (and probably a PhD).
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.
Sure, my Linux boxen have some fancy backgrounds, but I have far more important work to do than screw around taking a picture of the f'ing wall so I can see what's behind my computer...
I should not be to hard to do something like this using a simple webcamera that sends a stream to VideoLAN-client (for example), that in turn shows that stream as a wallpaper (this is a standard feature of VLC). I have to try this, just for fun. :)
I had an SGI O2 on my desk awhile back that had a camera on it. IRIX came with a screensaver that would take the image from the camera and enviro-map it to an image on the screen of a spinning metallic O2 workstation. It was cool, but ridiculously processor intensive.
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.
. . . why I want an image of the inside of my monitor??? :)
hawk
have WAY too much time on their hands.
(As I waste my time posting this.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Windows had a theme like this with vacuum tubes on the inside
yes, welcome to the age of vacuum tube computing
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
At least he had the guts to show the cables... I'd be afraid that if I did this, I'd be reminded what a rat's nest I have behind the machine...
I have to admit that out of all of them, the iPod looks like the cadidate most likely to be rigged. But, I still think that one is really just from the slightly differing contrast on the screen - if they had a DSLR they would have had more than enough resolution to achieve the result even with signifigant image warping. Of course you can also do all that in Photoshop, so we'll never really know for sure unless other proof is offered (it would be cool to see the orginal files that were used on the screen to proove how real it is).
Personally I fee that the work to lay out the whole setup was well done enough that the person is also likley to have taken the effort to do the real thing.
But I still think that a clever photoshop job really doesn't fit in with the spirit of the thing, and so I do not think many people would do it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you realize how many submissions Slashdot gets every day? There is plenty of news they could be posting.
I kept expecting to see a computer with a bong and stash bag "hidden" behind the "transparent" monitor.
The iPod Photo is supposed to have a pretty good screen, also with good color depth - and can be used to preivew images full screen.
So, it's possible. Like you say the text resoltion is tricky, I don't have one myself so I cant say if it's really high enough for that or not. I think we'll just have to leave it an open question.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why go through all that trouble? Just take the cross down and when you're not singing project one onto the wall. Problem solved.
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.
Get a totalfark account and see how bored you get reading "the latest news". Quantity has nothing to do with quality.