Popping into Harvard Bookstore proves to be a delightful treat. Being greeted by the old bookstore smell as you enter the door is intoxicating enough, but imaging my surprise finding one of the owners in the back making books on their new Espresso Book Machine 2.0 from On Demand Books, LLC.
Silicon Valley software engineer Ari Krupnik makes what he calls “pixel mosaics” as a hobby. Besides dice, he’s also used bullet casings and M&Ms. You may have seen Ari in this full-page ShopBot ad in MAKE 14. His rendering of Che Guevara, above, uses 400 black dice. He’s also done one of George Orwell. (“Maybe one day my prose can be as fluid as his,” says Ari–hear, hear!) This page includes another dice example and some good detail on Ari’s process.
The obvious caveat, here, is that these are CG renderings of a concept design. Even relatively simple devices and mechanisms tend to breed unexpected problems in the transition from virtual to actual, and, IMNSHO, the cat’s not really in the bag until you’ve made a real one in the real world. Still, pretty delightful mechanical design here. It’s called “Grand Central,” from Swedish freelance designers Sanna Lindström and Sigrid Strömgren. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
There are some updates, new images and videos on the “Wifi-Camera Obscura” (see our previous post here). The Wifi Camera is a camera that takes “pictures” of spaces illuminated by wifi in much the same way that a traditional camera takes pictures of spaces illuminated by visible light. The camera reveals the electromagnetic space of […]
Marcus Nowotny (Hamburg, Germany) created an awesome skateboard POV using a MiniPOV attached to the underside of his board: The schematic is drastically reduced to the original version, the LEDs have been reduced to white 0603 LEDs and laid out in a very small PCB, small enough to not touch the ground or come anywhere […]
You’ve seen tons of cool openFrameworks projects here on MAKE over the years. If you haven’t heard about this open source creative coding toolkit, you should. If you’re in NYC this weekend, there’s going to be a workshop on using openFrameworks at Parsons tomorrow: This DT Dorkshop will be lead by Parsons MFA Design + […]
Michael Boehm saw our post a couple of weeks ago about Etsy seller Stukenborg’s letterpress prints using dice as “type,” which mentioned the idea of using the same technique for making pixel-based images as well as geometric patterns. He got interested in the idea, went off to experiment, and eventually produced the dice-mosaic version of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres shown above. When he posted the results in the comment thread, I asked for, and he was nice enough to provide, a written explanation of the method, which uses Mark Probst’s open-source photomosaic utility Metapixel. I’ve reproduced Michael’s e-mail, with only minor edits, below. [Thanks, Michael!]
