light bulb is a levitating yet powered lightbulb. It will float stably in midair and remain on for years without any physical contact, charging, or batteries. Ironically, with the levitation and wireless power circuitry both on, this entire package still consumes less than half the power of an incandescent bulb.
This is not a trick or a photoshop manipulation. The bulb and the casing contain hidden circuitry that uses electromagnetic feedback to levitate the bulb roughly 2.5″ from the nearest object, and uses coupled resonant wireless power transfer to beam power from the housing into the bulb itself.
Mirrors Mirror is a new mechanical mirror made by Daniel Rozin.
Mirrors Mirror creates the viewers’ image by directing 768 small mirror tiles in a way that reflects different portions of their image. The piece is made of 24 columns of “pixels” that form a concaved curved surface that is aimed at the viewer. Brighter pixels reflect the upper body of the viewer and the wall behind him and dark ones are aimed lower. So the environment is important as it affects the reflection. The viewing experience is quite private as the resulting image can be seen only by the reflected person. This piece also includes an algorithmic animation feature that is triggered every time a person leaves the piece.
This is a video of The Plotting Machine by You Don’t Matter, in action. It is a modified plotting machine which can draw, scratch, cut and even paint. Why can’t I make such stuff? Damn.
The Unloader is quite a funny website. You can upload one of your local boring documents and pick one of the three ways how you want it to be destroyed. After receiving the file, you can really see how your document comes out of the printer. Unfortunately you won’t see the actual destruction of your document, but a pre produced video which is still impressive.
This campaign website for some Nokia mobile phones, was made by Farfar and Perfect Fools.
‘I See Beats’ is an interactive installation by Kyle McDonald. It is a beat sequencer where you’ll need a few people with mobile phones to create a sound. You have to hold up your phone with the screen lit, a webcam tracks your position and puts your phone on the sequencer grid. Normally you don’t get anything decent when a few people try to use an interface like this one, but here the result is quite good.
I wonder why no artist already did something like this during a concert …
The project consists of an eight-foot (2.5m) long industrial robot arm, costumed to resemble an enormous inchworm or elephant’s trunk, which responds in unexpected ways to the presence and movements of people in its vicinity. Sited on a low roof above a museum entrance, and governed by a real-time machine vision algorithm, Double-Taker (Snout) orients itself towards passers-by, tracking their bodies and suggesting an intelligent awareness of their activities. The goal of this kinetic system is to perform convincing “double-takes” at its visitors, in which the sculpture appears to be continually surprised by the presence of its own viewers – communicating, without words, that there is something uniquely surprising about each of us.
‘The Robotic Chair‘ is a project by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea & Matt Donovan.
The Robotic Chair (1984 – 2006) is a generic-looking wooden chair with the capacity to fall apart and put itself back together. With shuddering force the chair collapses to the floor then with persistence and determination proceeds to seek out its parts and upright itself. The Robotic Chair is distinguished in the world of objects for its capacity to elicit empathy, compassion and hope.
Timbap is a platform-independent application for augmented DJing. It was developed by students and assistants of the University of Ulm (Germany). It provides a rugged tangible interface for browsing your music collection and manipulating playback by scratching, pitching, skipping etc. Like many others it is based on an acoustic timecode signal recorded to vinyl records. In contrast to existing digital solutions however, it completely releases the DJ from mouse, keyboard and monitor. Instead it relies on physical interaction with the standard club turntable only.
It still sounds quite strange, right? So basically it is a projected video interface for selecting mp3′s. Maybe this video will make it all clear to you.
Guessing from the amount of student DJ projects, there are a lot of bedroom DJ’s among the students out there.
