Imaging

DIY Projection Screen Paint Tests

DIY Projection Screen Paint Tests

Movie theater and other high quality screens are often surfaced with tiny glass beads to provide high “screen gain,” which is a measure of the screen’s reflectivity versus a reference surface. It occurred to me it might be possible to DIY this effect on the cheap using 80-grit glass bead sandblasting media from Harbor Freight. So I bought 25 lbs and ran some tests. The short version? It works! But, as usual, not quite like I expected it to. Keep reading for all the gritty (ha) details, or just hang tight and wait for the full tutorial, coming soon!

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan30

Sharing Hi-Res 3D Fossil Models Online

Interesting item from Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, where paleontologist Thomas L. Adams and co-workers Christopher Strganac, Michael J. Polcyn, and Louis L. Jacobs have used a laser 3D scanner to produce a high-resolution model of a large outdoor dinosaur track which is a landmark in downtown Glen Rose, Texas. Exposed to the elements in the town square, the track is (very slowly) eroding, and the team’s freely downloadable 3D model is intended to both preserve it for posterity and to facilitate its study by fossil buffs all over the world. Their results are published online in Paleontologica Electronica. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan4
Gallery of Spherical Cockpit Panoramas

Gallery of Spherical Cockpit Panoramas

The field of panoramic photography needs some better terminology, IMHO: “360-degree panorama,” it seems to me, could just as easily apply to a circular panorama of, say, the horizon, as it could to a fully spherical panorama that also includes up, down, and every other direction in space you could possibly look from a particular point. Or maybe the term is already out there and I just couldn’t figure it out? If you’re in the know, please share below.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan

Hologram demo using Kinect

From New Scientist [via Boing Boing]: The holographic images are still rather fuzzy. But just a couple of months after the first demonstration of holographic telepresence, the frame rate has jumped a factor of 30, from one frame every two seconds to an impressive 15 frames per second. Michael Bove’s group at the MIT Media […]

Continue Reading Gareth Branwyn2