Interesting article over on TwistedSifter about the use of so-called "dazzle" or "razzle-dazzle" camouflage beginning during WWI. (The Wikipedia article is pretty good, too.) It's a kind of practical op-art: The idea was not so much to make the ship invisible against the background, but to confuse enemy weapons operators as to its distance and heading. The Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online collection of various paper plans for dazzle camouflage schemes donated by Maurice L. Freedman, who was district camoufleur for the 4th district of the U.S. Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation, and would go on to invent the board game "Battleship." [via Dude Craft]

A reader who saw Marc's recent post about an Arduino-controlled laser photo trigger wrote in to tell us about the amazing work of Belgian photographer and Flickr user fotoopa (which, we hear, as "foto opa," means something like "photo grandpa" in Dutch). That's him in the picture above, with the awesome homebrew laser-triggered camera rig that he uses to capture amazing pictures of insects in flight and splashing drops of colored water. I'm generally skeptical of film purists, but fotoopa makes the compelling claim that no digital camera has the shutter speed necessary to do this kind of imagery. He claims the Compur #1 shutter used in his 2008 setup has a speed of less than 5 milliseconds. Technical details about his 2009 setup are available here. [Thanks, Wilco Schillemans!]

Carnegie Mellon's Dr. Yaser Sheikh has developed a prototype augmented reality (AR) system that combines images from two or more cameras to allow drivers, for instance, to see around blind corners by making intervening structures "invisible." In the simplest case, the image from a camera on the blind side of an obstacle is mapped, with appropriate foreshortening and in real time, onto the visible surface of the obstacle in the display from a camera at the user's position.

The concept reminded me of a brainstorm I had during my last commercial airline flight. Crammed into a middle seat on a crowded 747, feeling claustrophobic and a bit airsick, straining to get a look out one of the distant porthole windows, I longed for a pair of AR glasses that would make the plane invisible so I could look freely around the sky. The video feeds from panoramic cameras mounted above and below the fuselage could be combined and processed through a head-tracking system so that passengers could have an unimpeded external view in any direction they cared to look--the ground, the clouds, the night-time stars up above. Such a system would have no clear commercial purpose other than passenger comfort, but think how much more enjoyable those long-haul flights could be if you were soaring through the wild blue yonder instead of staring at the back of the seat in front of you.

[via Boing Boing]

Gebhard Sengmüller's Very Slow Scan Television uses injected ink and bubble wrap to recreates the scanning of CRT displays … very … slowly -

Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.

Download Servo Tools for Maya

Installation tutorials

The positive response to my recent anamorphic Pac-Man post led me to dig up this oldie-but-goodie from Boing Boing. This "UP" signage is only one of several anamorphic signs from The Eureka Tower Carpark in Melbourne, Australia. The anamorphic projections, designed by Axel Peemöller, only read properly when viewed from the correct angle.

YouTube user brusspup created this anamorphic projection of Pac-Man chasing a ghost across a complex surface in his apartment. It only looks right from the one angle; as the camera moves away, you start to see how the lines have to wander willy-nilly across the walls to create the effect. [via Neatorama]

More:

• Anamorphic pinhole camera of sturdiness
• Anamorphic painting of a ship
• Homemade anamorphic camera

Inspired by Mike Gould's "Lunchbox Laser Shows" project in MAKE, Volume 20, Karl Lunt made his own, more simplified version, scaling down the mechanics and changing up the motor and control scheme:

Since I didn't have a 1 RPM motor and I wanted to use something about that speed, I took the slowest, smallest gearhead motor in my junk box and powered it with a pulse-width-modulated (PWM) drive signal from the ATtiny13A MCU. Though the motor started out at about 10 RPM when driven with 5 VDC, I was able to get very smooth 1 RPM motion using PWM. If you aren't comfortable using an MCU for what is admittedly a simple function, you could substitute a suitable 555 timer circuit; check the web for pages that will help you design such a circuit.

A cheap, easy laser light show

From MAKE magazine:

Want to know how to build a hydrogen rocket? How about a laser light show in a lunchbox? Or a simple remote-controlled videocam car? Or maybe you want to go old-school and build a wooden mini sailboat or toy car launcher? All this and tons more, plus revealing photos of Adam Savage's maker childhood, can all be found in MAKE, Volume 20, "For Kids of All Ages." Get your individual copy in the Maker Shed, or subscribe now.

I love this DIY camera dolly track, built from a $15 "Ivar" Ikea shelving "side unit."

A few days ago, I found out that the Ivar "wooden ladder" was perfect to use it as rails for my cinema dolly! I can now make some nice sequence shots with this 18€ (USD$15) accessory from Ikea.

[Thanks, Tim Tate!]

Ivar loves Dolly

Here's the latest project from YesYesNo, this time in Auckland, NZ! It's called Night Lights:

In this installation YesYesNo teamed up with The Church, Inside Out Productions and Electric Canvas to turn the Auckland Ferry Building into an interactive playground. Our job was to create an installation that would go beyond merely projection on buildings and allow viewers to become performers, by taking their body movements and amplifying them 5 stories tall.

We used 3 different types of interaction - body interaction on the two stages, hand interaction above a light table, and phone interaction with the tracking of waving phones. There were 6 scenes, cycled every hour for the public.

Jakub's Decaudion project uses Supercollider, Processing, & Arduino along with an array of photocells to create some elegantly simple interactivity. [via Arduino Forums]

Announced at this year's CES, Flir's Scout gives consumers true thermographic vision -- imaging based not on light but on heat. Flir is marketing the Scout to consumers but it's hard to see Joe Sixpack wanting to drop $3K (MSRP) on one. Which is not to say it doesn't have its obvious uses -- for instance, a hunter could use it to follow a blood trail at dusk, or a homeowner could pinpoint heat leaks.

Built around Flir's leading edge thermal night vision technology, Scout gives outdoor enthusiasts the power to see people, animals, and their surroundings clearly in total darkness, as well as through smoke, dust, and light fog. Scout uses a thermal camera to make video images from heat, not light, and displays this video on its built‐in LCD eyepiece.

In addition to providing improved visibility in almost every conceivable environmental condition, Scout enables hikers, campers, and hunters to keep track of other people in their party, find and track animals, and navigate safely and accurately even in total darkness.

The Vuzix Wrap 920AR is the sort of high-end consumer gadget that would end up serving as merely a head-mounted display and its AR component would fall by the wayside. But imagine its full potential in the hands of an expert hacker...

Wrap 920AR eyewear [consists of] a stereo camera pair that "looks" into the world, bringing mixed and augmented reality content to life. With the new Wrap 920AR, users can view the real-world environment and computer-generated imagery seamlessly mixed together; allowing video game characters to jump out of the TV and come to life in your living room, or magazines and books with animated links back to the web in real time.



The stereo camera pair delivers a single 1504 x 480 side-by-side image that can be viewed in 3D stereoscopic video, while the video eyewear provides an unprecedented 67-inch display as seen from 10 feet. The Wrap 920AR also includes a 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker, which allows for absolute accuracy of roll pitch and yaw and also X, Y and Z positioning in 3D space. Selected as a 2010 CES Innovations Award winner and a semifinalist for the "Last Gadget Standing" competition, the Wrap 920AR will be the highlight of Vuzix' display at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show.

Here are the specs:

• 1/3-inch wide VGA Digital Image Sensor
• Resolution: 752H x 480W
• Includes 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker
• Frame rate: 60 fps
• Dynamic range: >55dB linear; >80-100dB in HiDy mode
• Shutter efficiency: >99%
• ADC Resolution: 10-bit column parallel
• High-speed USB 2.0
• PC and Mac compatible
• System requirements: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows7, Mac OS X 10.4.9 or higher
• MSRP: $799.99

More:

• Make your food look better with augmented reality cookies
• Augmented Reality Modelling Tool
• Augmented reality magic

Pardon me while I go chemistry geek. It has recently come to my attention that Leo Gross and co-workers at IBM Research in Switzerland have developed a special atomic-force microscopy technique that can image actual molecules with enough resolution to "see" individual bonds and hydrogen atoms. Shown uppermost is a computer-generated model of the pentacene molecule, and below it, an actual image from the microscope. The microscope's probe is tipped with a single molecule of carbon monoxide. Unbelievable.

This light sculpture by German multimedia design collective lab binaer may look like a persistence of vision (POV) display at first glance, but in fact works on a very different principle. It's built from a record player, and the turntable has been treated with a phosphorescent pigment. Messages are printed on the pigment by an array of bright lights on the tone arm, and slowly fade to black as the phosphorescence wanes. It's titled »Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod« or "Death calls the tune." [via Hack a Day]

Tho Bui writes:

I've been toying with homemade steadicams lately. The gimbal joint usually gives people a fit. The roundness of the acorn nut fits into the indentation of the opposite screw/nut and freely rotates.

More:

DIY steadicam, version five

With the new LEGO Photo iPhone app you can convert snapshots into a LEGO photo mosaic. Just take a picture, press a button, and watch the app build an image out of LEGO. Use the resulting image on your favorite social networking site or as a guide for your own layout. [via techchee]

Flickr member Giant Eye shares this convenient method for taking life a little less seriously -

All the world is a theater and you, with shades, will riff upon it. Seeing the humor in things is sometimes a matter of the company you keep. Laughing at all the world's ills becomes so much easier with Mike/Joel and the bots along for the ride.

Back in July, I blogged about YB2Normal's inexpensive PVC gimbal for a home-made steadicam rig. Since that time, William has been steadily refining his design. Version five, pictured above, features a redesigned gimbal incorporating an off-the-shelf auto part. [via Hack A Day]

From the pages of MAKE:

Johnny Lee showed us how to build a $14 Video Camera Stabilizer way back in MAKE 01.

Wow, an incredible Instructable fromKyle McDonald:

The same technique used for Thom's face in the Radiohead "House of Cards" video. I'll walk you through setting up your projector and camera, and capturing images that can be decoded into a 3D point cloud using a Processing application. Most 3D scanning is based on triangulation (the exception being time-of-flight systems like Microsoft's "Natal "). Triangulation works on the basic trigonometric principle of taking three measurements of a triangle and using those to recover the remaining measurements

.

My friend Jon Singer has been experimenting with creating a relatively-cheap, straightforward flashlamp-pumped dye laser. This first-blush version uses caps he bought on eBay. As he refines the design, he hopes to avoid as many commercial components as possible. This proof-of-concept build was attempting to answer the musical question: Is a dozen Joules enough to threshold a dye? Answer: yes.

Toward a Straightforward DIY Flashlamp-Pumped Organic Dye Laser -- Step 1, First Proof of Principle: A Minimalist Machine

Jon also recently called me, excited, 'cause he'd managed to get three dyes to oscillate in the same cuvette to create RGB laser light! The guy's a monster. Half the time, I don't really understand what he's talking about, but I always feel smarter for having done so. See his "RGB 'White' Dye Laser Light from a Single Cuvette" research report here.

More:
Homegrown laser crystals
El cheapo mirror mounts

Transparentius, by noted Russian design firm Art Lebedev, consists of a semi-trailer equipped with a projector that displays the view from a forward-looking camera on the back of the trailer. [via Neatorama]

From PhysOrg.com:

A team of researchers at the FOM institute AMOLF (The Netherlands) has succeeded for the first time in powering an energy transfer between nano-electromagnets with the magnetic field of light.

This breakthrough is of major importance in the quest for magnetic 'meta-materials' with which light rays can be deflected in every possible direction. This could make it possible to produce perfect lenses, and in the fullness of time, even 'invisibility cloaks.'

[Thanks, Alberto!]

Above picture is of invisibility artist Liu Bolin (which has nothing to do directly with this story, as his method of invisibility is far more low-tech).

Tiny nano-electromagnets turn a cloak of invisibility into a possibility

Vinmarshall posted this pic of his "bomb-proof" camera blast shield - and despite some limited flammability, the tough enclosure seems to live up to its name -

Check out the full how-to on PopSci.

Over at Fun Science Gallery, this English translation of a 2002 article by Giorgio Carboni describing, in great detail, the construction of a beautiful homemade rotating-objective panoramic film camera. It's made of brass and plastic stock. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]

Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood. The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus. Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.

Built by Associate Professor Yojiro Ishino of the Nagoya Institute of Technology, this giant camera took six months to build and has reportedly been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the camera with the record-holding highest number of lenses. It's about 3 inches high and 18.5 inches across, and was built to study flames by capturing them simultaneously from as many angles as possible a large number of angles. [via Neatorama]

From the Design Media Lab at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, this "crystal zoetrope" technology involves spinning a cylinder of acrylic with internally etched 3D designs. The disk is surrounded by an array of LEDs that can flash in time with the rotation, or slightly asynchronously, to make the designs appear to move in space, and, additionally, to gradually rotate around the center of the cylinder in one direction or the other. The direction and speed of rotation can be controlled by gestural movements on the tabletop. [via Dude Craft]

From the Chromoscope intro:

Ever wanted X-ray specs or super-human vision? Chromoscope lets you explore our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and the distant Universe in a range of wavelengths from X-rays to the longest radio waves.

Seen above is an image in visible light and in radio waves (408 MHz) [via Tim O'Reilly's Twitter feed]

Man, this is awesome: This clock is actually an LED screen looping a video of the designer manually redrawing the minute hand every minute, in real time, for an hour. I guess the hour hand is probably moved digitally. Would be kinda scary if he actually stood there and redrew the hands manually every minute for a full 12 hours. I don't know much about the designer; just that the video was filmed "at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2009" and posted to YouTube by A3Network. Feel free to give a shout in the comments if you've got more info. [via Neatorama]

Update: Turns out this clock is part of Maarten Baas's REAL TIME project, which we first covered back on the 4th. And for the record: No, there's not really a person inside of it. [Thanks, Matt!]