With a desire to find out how a deep display would look, video artist Blair Neal created the Crayolascope, a fantastic 3D depth display out of a dozen hacked Crayola Glow Books. An Arduino Mega is driving the display and the user can adjust the speed of the pre-drawn animation or scrub through the frames. The unconventional display was exhibited at The New York Hall of Science (home of World Maker Faire New York) as part of the animation exhibit and Blair says that it’s a big hit with kids. He also has a few plans for the next version:

I’d like to play with more powerful lighting and more full edge lighting, as well as solve the issue of internal reflectivity between panels degrading the quality of the “image”. Once the animation goes in about 14-18 frames, it becomes very difficult to see from one side unless it is in a very dark space. I would love to get it much deeper than that, or at least make a finer Z-space resolution.

[Thanks, Blair!]

BY Matt Richardson

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.

10 Responses to Crayolascope: an Analog Depth Display

  1. Lordy that is neat. I actually though the light bleed gave the z-ordering a nice “lo-fi” quality, although that may have just been the video.

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