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USB Disco Dance Floor
pi42 writes "Some MIT students built this USB controlled disco dance floor for their dorm lounge. It was built in a week, has 1536 LEDs, 20,000 hand-soldered connections, and is capable of displaying 12-bit color. Check out videos and photos." You can even send the floor an email, though it might not write back.
So while Caltech is traveling across the country to put up balloons, MIT students are building a kickass USB-controlled disco floor? I think we all know which school knows where it's at.
The girls always go for John Travolta, not Poindexter
Do a little dance, make a little love - get down tonight!
Screw that disco crap. I can see a better use for it.
A Giant Tetris Board. Think of it. You've got the grid-like squares that Tetris has.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
I had the opportunity to go to several parties in Boston a few years back. A couple at Harvard and a couple at MIT and a couple near BU. Needless to say, the quality of the parties was inversely proportional to the U.S. News and World Report rankings of these schools. Not to take anything away from the homely girls and stereotypical MIT men, but MIT parties were only slightly better than the Harvard parties in terms of fun. However, Harvard edged out MIT in terms of attractive women (much to Mrs. Claus' chagrin).
Boston U had the best combination of attractive women and fun parties, though the "talent" pool in Boston left much to be desired.
What would be nice is to have this floor shipped over to Caltech or CMU where the attractive and successful Californians can take full advantage of it. The MIT geeks can still control the floor remotely from their dorms in Boston.
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
MIT... dancefloor...
There is a joke in there somewhere, I just know it.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If only I had thought of that 20 years ago when disco was 'in' and I was a uni (college if you live in the US). There may have been some chance of spending nights with a real girl in stead of a cold, cold terminal. On the other hand. Probably not.
I bet they are having to beat hot babes off the dance floor now to make sure all the hotties get a fair chance to show their goodies.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Anyone else starting to think on DDR with a big dancefloor instead of a tiny dancemat? With all thoose touch sensors...
The Robot! old skool geeks, word to ya mammas
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
Any bets on how long until a Tetris clone is implemented for this?
Apparently the panels also have pressure sensors on them -- that's so cool. It sounds they have the hardware they need for an awesome game of massively-multiplayer Twister or Mosh Mosh Revolution. Variants of pinball, pong, or arkanoid could also be fun, with virtual paddles drawn wherever there were two nearby pressure points (i.e. feet).
I see this, sitting in my dorm room at 4:30AM and I say to myself, wow, if I were more productive I'd be building something like this instead of reading slashdot. Then I realize that I'm lazy and stop this line of inquiry before it makes me want to actually get up and do something, maybe next week......
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
How long do you think you could stare at the floor before falling over/vomiting/having a seizure? I'm going with 15 minutes.
http://www.lightspace.biz/
It says 30 FPS (and 4096 colors) on the front page.
Anything you do can get you slashdotted, including nothing.
Well, back to studying for my Caltech entrance exams.
Anyone here know how to blow up a baboon?
Seriously, I saw one girl in there who was apparantly there to test the floor's durability.
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
We thought here of making something similar that even mimics the "Dance Dance Revolution" machine that you find in video arcades, haven't figured out how to sense the pressure though, any ideas?
They go for Neo though, didn't they? Almost every girl I know like "The Matrix" movie because of him.
They go for 'Movie Star, Keanu Reeves', not, 'Hacker, Neo'.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
As you can see on the video, the floor surface was thoroughly stress-tested by a 300-pound hippopotamus on high heels doing the macarena.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
and...who's writing the firmware update and driver so I can hook up my PSP to this thing?
They have a simple touch sensor under every tile, RTFA.
Martin
Bexley had the same thing 20 years ago and that one was controlled with your mind! Man, I miss their parties. Sorry, what were we talking about?
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
See my journal, I write things there
does it draw power from the usb bus or does it require an external power supply?
- The emails you send do not get displayed on the floor, in case you were wondering. Ddf is just the email list.
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The people dancing in the video are not at a party, but members of a theater group that were recuited after their performance to shoot the video. At parties it's much groovier.
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The tiles on the floor can be controlled in real time, and by either a standalone program or an XMMS plugin (a spectrum analyzer is working as of recently) And yes, it should be relatively trivial to program tetris for it, though it hasn't been done yet.
- Our inspirational song is "Work it" by Daft Punk.
Aaron S.The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey
"Build a USB dance floor, gosh!"
...I actually saw the pictures... ...and then the movies... ...and then the movies of MIT students "dancing" on it... ...and then what an MIT soldering-iron jockey's idea of film editing meant... ...I'd say "they must've sniffed too many flux fumes," but no, that's not going to be what caused this...