I absolutely love Ben Cowell-Tomas’s Lightplot, a 3D light painting system. Here’s how it works: an animation is imported from 3DS Max into his custom software which, in turn, drives a robotic arm to draw each frame with an LED in a 3D space. The software also controls a DSLR camera to take long exposure photographs of each frame of the animation. Ben documented the build process in great detail and also shows off what the machine is capable of in some beautiful animations, embedded below:
Matt Richardson is a Brooklyn-based creative technologist, contributing editor for MAKE magazine, and co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi. He's also the owner of Awesome Button Studios, a technology consultancy. Highlights from his work include the Descriptive Camera (a camera which outputs a text description instead of a photo) and The Enough Already (a DIY celebrity-silencing device). Matt's work has been featured at The Nevada Museum of Art, The Rome International Photography Festival, Milan Design Week and has garnered attention from The New York Times, Wired, and New York Magazine.
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