by Nirav Patel
Continuing on the theme of interesting things to do with an interactive globe, I added a live satellite tracking mode to sosg. The program polls a local PREDICT server for location and visibility information about the satellites being tracked by it. It draws the name of each satellite and the path it is following in …
Continue reading “Satellites on a Snow Globe Spherical Display”
Science On a Sphere is a NOAA project typically using four projectors to display planetary data on a six foot diameter sphere. As a federal agency, NOAA publishes data that is not copyrightable. These public domain datasets are pretty impressive, ranging from plate tectonics to solar storms. They are also insanely high resolution, with mp4 …
Continue reading “Science on a Snow Globe Spherical Display”
A few month hiatus from this blog turned into five and a half years, but that is a much longer story. This one is about the state of desktop spherical displays in 2018. In 2011, I hacked together the Snow Globe spherical display from a laser pico-projector, an off the shelf fish-eye lens, a bathroom …
Continue reading “Snow Globe Redux: Gakken Worldeye Projector Upgrade”
After grabbing a couple of Microvision SHOWWX laser picoprojectors when they went up on Woot a few months back, I started looking for ways to use them. Microvision started out of a project at the University of Washington HITLab in 1994 to develop laser based virtual retinal displays. That is, a display that projects an …
Continue reading “Blinded by the Light: DIY Retinal Projection”
After getting my Lytro camera yesterday, I set about answering the questions about the light field capture format I had from the last time around. Lytro may be focusing (pun absolutely intended) on the Facebook using crowd with their camera and software, but their file format suggests they don’t mind nerds like us poking around. …
Continue reading “Reverse Engineering the Lytro .LFP File Format”
My roommate’s struggles designing his first 3D printed part gave me the idea to write an augmented reality viewer that lets you preview and interact with STL models in the real world without having to commit an object to plastic. This is actually sort of an update on part of a project I did for …
Lytro recently made its namesake light field camera available for preordering. The light field camera reaches closer to the plenoptic function than a standard camera in that instead of only summing the photons to arrive at chromacity and luminosity at each pixel, it additionally determines directional information. It does so by placing an array of …
Blinded by the Light Sunnyvale, CA – April 2012I built a virtual retinal display using an off the shelf Microvision laser projector, low cost optics, and a 3D printed frame. The resulting direct image is bright but well within safe operating power. Semi-Automatic Paintbrush Sunnyvale, CA – December 2011Using an infrared camera, an InkShield, an …
Since reading Snow Crash, I’ve been drawn to the idea of having my own personal Earth. Because I’m stuck in reality and the virtual version of it is always 5 years away, I’m building a physical artifact that approximates the idea: an interactive spherical display. This is of course something that exists and can likely …
Continue reading “Snow Globe: Part One, Cheap DIY Spherical Projection”
Since my seemingly fragile 3D printer had never left my desk before and even in prime condition could only print an object every 10 minutes or so, I decided that I needed a backup project for the Bay Area Maker Faire last month. I conscripted Will to help me out on a purely software Kinect …
Continue reading “Maker Ant Farm: Minecraft Skin Generation with a Kinect”