From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.
exogenous writes “A full-size working harpsichord made from Lego”. With the exception of the wire strings, this instrument is entirely constructed out of LEGO parts–the keyboard, jacks, jack rack, jack rail, plectra, soundboard, bridge, hitch pins, tuning pins, wrestplank, nut, case, legs, lid, lid stick, and music stand are all built out of interlocking ABS (Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene) plastic bricks and related pieces. There’s even a MP3 of it playing. Link.
Peter Kirn has a great overview of how Chris O’Shea is going open source with his experiments in building tangible interfaces — interactive tables on which moving physical objects (like blocks) create visuals and sound. One obstacle in this technology has been people haven’t been able to refine the techniques; they just create bare-bones proof-of-concept but haven’t been able to build on others’ work. This is really encouraging. Link.
Karl writes “I have a bunch of super 8 movies that I inherited from my father and would like to put them on DVD using some kind of compression (is mpg). Do have any suggestions? I have tried the projector with mirrors and a 8mm camcorder approach and was not satisfied with the quality“. Suggestions for Karl? I found this here, but not sure if that’s the best way. Post up in the comments!
G4’s AOTS has a cool remix of our Aerial Photography project. They hacked up a wireless camera and some battery packs to transmit video to a laptop down below. Here’s a video clip of part I of the project, they’re posting video and images soon. On another related AOTS note, looks like MAKE will be on the show in June! View QuickTime video.
Amazing public space art installation. The tower at the the S/U station has an odd glass cube on the top and the artists decided to give it eyes. The passersby could participate by looking inside the box. Their eyes were then projected onto the glass–front of the tower, making it look like the head of a robot with ever changing and personalized eyes. The project was an attempt to make “street–art that anybody can influence and use playfully.” Link.
Via /. We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location. The technique is completely image-based, requiring no knowledge of scene geometry or surface properties, and by its nature automatically includes all transport paths, including shadows, interreflections and caustics. I need to really read this again and watch the video. Link.
Here’s a simple and fun project to do with Google maps and Flickr. Flickr member iDanSimpson has a step by step on taking a screenshot of a location, zooming out and using the build in slideshow to make a little view of just how small things are. It’s much like a DIY “Powers of 10”. Link.
