My old pal, Bay Area shutterbug Billy Baque, has a passion for the handmade, low-tech, all-in-one cameras-plus-darkrooms used by street photographers around the world. The so-called Cuban Polaroid is a typical example—a wooden box with a light-tight sleeve for the photographer’s arm at one end and a lens on the other. Billy describes the typical […]
The current iPhone takes a pretty decent macro shot to begin with. If you’re looking to go beyond what you get out-of-box, take a look at the 8x macro lens from Westchester, IL area Etsy user Chris Ferguson.
The clever designers at Chicago’s Tanagram adapted code developed to recognize those little black-and-white augmented-reality markers (“fiduciary markers”) for target acquisition on a DARPA-funded robot that can autonomously deliver humanitarian aid and other supplies to 20′ square markers unrolled on the ground. What’s great about fiducial marker tracking technology is that it is pre-built to […]
If you’re looking for an interesting project for your DSLR camera, you might find the DIY Tilt-Shift lens from Flickr user Maciej Pietuszynski to be worthy of your weekend project time. Maciej’s version uses a shower head and rubber glove in addition to a 50mm/1.8 prime lens. If you’re comfortable cutting a pipe with a hacksaw and disassembling a perfectly good lens, you can pull off this build. The images a lens like this produces more than makes up for the time it takes to assemble.
The viSparsh belt developed by Young India Fellows Rolly Seth, Jatin Sharma and Tushar Chugh in New Delhi with guidance by Rahul Mangharam of the University of Pennsylvania, is a computer vision assisted haptic feedback system that uses a Microsoft Kinect to detect objects near the wearer and notifies them through an array of vibration motors across the belt
Destin of Smarter Every Day took the lens off his Canon 60D, pointed a Phantom Flex high speed video camera at the shutter, and took a picture. The exposure cycle happens in four stages and lasts less than a tenth of a second in real time, but the Phantom Flex stretches that action out to […]
Yesterday I mentioned MIT’s soon-to-be-released open-courseware materials detailing a DIY phrased radar array radar system built from pegboard and wi-fi antennae. The project, from MIT engineers Drs. Bradley Perry, Jonathan Paul Kitchens, Patrick Bell, Jeffrey Herd, and Greg Charvat produces ‘radar video’ at about three frames per second. Greg just e-mailed me a link to […]
