pixels on the pathway
by admin on Dec.07, 2011, under architecture
Way back in July, I wrote about Digital Light… showing the way. In that posting, I talked about intelligent outdoor lighting that would know where we are, where we wanted to go, and would help show us how to get there. And, it would save energy at the same time.
A site in London (the City of Westminster, to be more precise) designed by Jason Bruges Studio is part way there as you can see from the video below from Bruge’s website. He treats this as art and well he should, saying:
“The artwork responds to the different speeds, rhythms and concentration of people in the alley, and a flowing pattern of light is built up in the passageway which reflects the recent movement.”
But at the same time, it’s lighting, too. He goes on to say:
“White LED uplights, recessed into the paving, increase in intensity as people pass by causing a rippling wave of light to move through the passageway tracing their movement. When there are no pedestrians the lights dim to a low brightness to save energy while also providing a safe level of illumination.”
I like this a lot. It’s art. It’s functional. It’s smart about energy. It’s responsive. Now imagine what could be done with color and with a lot more pixels.
Check out his website. The studio has some really interesting pixels everywhere projects include Mimosa for Philips using Lumiblade LEDs.
Tattle tale pixels
by admin on Nov.03, 2011, under fashion, fun
I found this on the Arduino blog recently: Matt Leggett has been having some fun
with wearable pixels. He sewed an alcohol sensor, some LEDs and an Arduino processor into a jacket. The idea is that you breathe into the sensor and the LEDs light up to show how inebriated you are. Too many lit LEDs and your friends should call a taxi for you. Perhaps the Arduino could even make the call automatically. Maybe Moritz Waldemeyer or Vega Wang could incorporate this into their wearable electronics.
I think this could be done without needing to blow into a sensor. After all, too many drinks and you might not remember how! SoberSteering is developing a car steering wheel that senses blood alcohol levels through ones skin. Maybe their sensor could be built into clothing and sense alcohol levels in real time.
I know of more than a few fellow bloggers who probably wouldn’t wear this kind of this kind of clothing. For them, it would mean pixels everywhere would keep them from going anywhere, by car at least <grin>. Or, at the very least, they may stop getting served earlier in the evening.
In fact, MicroTiles might never have been invented if certain unnamed inventors had been wearing Leggett’s invention!
Touched by a Pixel
by Bob Rushby on Nov.02, 2011, under novel technology, research
Chris Harrison of Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft researchers have
been collaborating on using the human body as an input surface. They call this approach “OmniTouch”. Chris Harrison’s earlier project called ‘Skinput’ had similar goals and had a more interesting name but OmniTouch has some interesting advances over Skinput. Read on.
If this looks familiar to you, you may be thinking of Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense project at MIT Medialab a while back. OmniTouch has some interesting advances over SixthSense, though.
Mistry’s SixthSense also projected an image on ones body but used fiducials (colored marks) on the tips of the users fingers. A wearable camera tracked the fiducials and a computer deduced if a finger was touching a projected input point.
Harrison’s Skinput used a picoprojector to display an image on a body surface like a hand or a forearm. Bioacoustic techniques using a specially-designed armband detected taps on the skin and, with a bit of signal processing, could determine where on the skin the tap occurred. Skinput needed an armband which could be covered by clothing so it was a bit less obtrusive than the SixthSense fingertip markers.
OmniTouch enables a wide variety of surfaces to be input devices, not just a body surface. It uses a wearable projector and camera like SixthSense, but doesn’t require SixthSense’s markers on ones fingertips. OmniTouch uses a depth sensing camera, similar to Kinnect, but capable of shorter focus distances which increases flexibility. So, for example, one could use a wall or a pad of paper as an interactive surface. Depth sensing allows touch as well as hovering gestures.
The concept is very interesting. Wearing a projector and a depth sensing camera is clunky, but the concept is interesting…. interactive pixels everywhere in front of you. It’s just a proof of concept… now we need smart companies to make it small, stylish, and usable. Check out the video below from Chris Harrison’s website.
Here are a couple of links if you want more detail: http://chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput/SkinputHarrison.pdf and http://chrisharrison.net/projects/omnitouch/omnitouch.pdf
Seeing differently with pixels everywhere
by Bob Rushby on Sep.26, 2011, under art, musings
I worry about what all these pixels will be used for. I mean, pixels everywhere is a lot of pixels if they’re really going to be everywhere, right? I’ve come across two people who are thinking about what pixels can do on a large scale.
Architect Greg Tran (subject of a future post) is exploring new ways of seeing the world as it might be. British artist David Hockney points to new ways to see the world as it is. There was a recent article in Technology Review by Martin Gayford about Hockney’s work in this area.
He writes about an array 18 HD displays (about 35 million pixels, which is a lot of pixels, I’m sure you’ll agree). The content was recorded on 9 cameras. Each half of the display shows the same moving scene but slightly displaced in time.
So what? Well, with this simple idea, the viewer can see the scene as is it and as it just was. Or, thinking differently, you can effectively see the scene as it is, and at the same time see what it soon will be. That’s definitely is not how we look at the world now.
David Hockney is a renowned artist and the Technology Review article looks at this work in that light. It is indeed potentially beautiful and enlightening. It’s also something potentially important as a new way of visualization. Imagine this beyond a puny 18 screens, but at room scale or larger.
Hockney is looking at ‘everywhere’ differently. How many other exciting new ways will there be to view the world when there really are unlimited pixels available everywhere?
ArduinoArts’ “Annoying Ikea Lamp” project
by admin on Sep.20, 2011, under fun, furniture, technology
Last month I blogged about the LuminAR project underway at MIT. Recently on the Hack A Day website I came across a decidedly low-tech similar project by the folks at Arduino Arts.
Recall that LuminAR combined a pico-projector and camera with control electronics and firmware to achieve a gesture-based digital lamp. Arduino Arts just focused on the controlling a simple desk lamp, but they achieved something that is eerily similar to well-known Pixar animation. Take a look at the YouTube video to see for yourself.
The “annoying” term comes from their website. I think a better word would be “intriguing” because there are so many possibilities.
Now if they could put a pico-projector inside the lamp, and add a camera, well then they would be awfully close to creating something people would recognize as digital light. If LuminAR looked more like this it would be even cooler than it already is.
These guys based their project around the Arduino processor. There are a huge number of people creating projects using the open-source / open-hardware Arduino platform. It’s grown far beyond a cult — it’s a full grown movement. I confess to having a few Arduinos in my lab at home. Google “arduino” and you’ll get many, many hits.
Stretchable Light
by Bob Rushby on Aug.31, 2011, under fashion, interior design, LED/OLED, technology
I’ve blogged several times about wearable pixels as well as pixels for interior design and architecture.
But for the world to be a canvas for digital light, digital light must conform to the world as it is — a world of moving shapes and forms. Forms that bend, shift and stretch. Projected light does this, but it can be limited by ambient light, sight lines, the color of the surface, and projector positioning issues. Pixels from projected light are really reflected pixels.
But what if the digital canvas could directly emit light, not just reflect it? That would open up a huge number of ways to use digital light. Recently I posted about work at the University of Illinois-Urbana where electronic circuits, including circuits with LEDs, could be put directly on the surface of the skin and other flexible surfaces.
stretchable polymer LED
Now, we’ve learned about the work of Dr. Qibing Pei his team at UCLA. The picture shows a blue light emitting surface being stretched 45%. The stretching is reversible.
This is a really important step forward. So far, we’ve mostly seen bendable light, but those approaches were usually brittle –and bendable isn’t the same as stretchable. The UCLA team solved this by fabricating transparent electrodes that included single-walled conductive carbon nanotubes and polymer composite electrodes in an interpenetrating network of nanotubes and polymer. This created a combined electrode with low sheet resistance, high transparency, high compliance and low surface roughness. They sandwiched a light emitting plastic between two of these new electrodes, applied current, and created stretchable light.
The pictures show a single stretchable light emitting surface…essentially one pixel. But this is just the beginning. Image this scaled up into large numbers of tiny, colorful, controllable, malleable pixels.
It’s early days yet, but imagine this being applied to wall coverings, furniture, curtains, clothes. It all depends on how rugged, scalable –and of course inexpensive– this process will ultimately become. It’s no stretch (bad pun) to say this could be a big step forward to the pixels-everywhere future.
You can read the UCLA press release here.
LuminAR
by Bob Rushby on Aug.24, 2011, under furniture, research, technology
One of my earliest posts (way back in June) was Seeing the (digital) light. In it, I mentioned one of my early ideas was to use picoprojectors as digital light sources for interactive, responsive, desk lamps and room lighting.
Seeing the (digital) light
Other people have been thinking about responsive light and it should be no surprise that one of those people is at MIT Medialab. Natan Linder has a project called LuminAR that uses a picoprojector as a digital bulb. He combines that with a camera system and a robotic arm and cool things happen… gesture based interaction, lighting, pixel modulation –digital light!
Natan Linder's LuminAR project
Watch his video below and see for yourself. It’s not pretty –it’s a proof of concept, after all — but I think it’s beautiful!
Pixels everywhere.
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