The ultimate geek house

Lab in delft
Okay. It’s a lab. Not a house. But while visiting the excellent people at the Tribler project over at the university of Delft in Holland this building caught my attention. Mostly because of the architecture. Looks pretty cool. And when you consider the utterly geeky stuff they do in there it gets even better:

* Eutectic freeze crystallisation
* Ionic liquids
* Scale prevention
* Scale removal by ultrasound
* Protein precipitation
* Protein drying
* Supercritical dyeing
* Supercritical textile dry cleaning
* Supercritical metal extraction
* Capture of particulate matter
* Carbon dioxide sequestration
* Foaming of plastics
* Cannabis isolation
* In line purification
* Extractive crystallisation

At least one of the activities listed is something that I think is quite special for a Dutch university. More details here. If you add the fact that some of the students live in condos like the ones in the image below you would expect cool stuff to come out of this university.

Student Condo

So, have a look at Tribler. A BitTorrent client that you will see more of in the future. They have some pretty interesting features coming up.

The ultimate geek house

Morphovision – you don’t believe your eyes

More goodies from Siggraph 2006. Morphovision is a project by Toshio Iwai. The combination of a spinning model of a house and some special lights give an illusion that is a strange experience. Something that looks like a true 3D projected image in front of your eyes. And, well – it is. Because the spinning model is a true model. A house made of wood and plastic. Problem is that the light fools your eyes into seeing strange things happening to the house… You have to see it yourself with your own eyes to really get the strange image.

However, for the people that wasn’t able to visit Siggraph this year I have made this little video to give an impression.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf

Link to video

Morphovision – you don’t believe your eyes

Submerging Technologies

 

More geekumentaries from Siggraph 2006. Three interactive water displays: a musical harp with water “strings”, a liquid touchscreen and a tantalizing fountain that withdraws when a hand comes near. You find some more details from the official Siggraph 2006 site here.

Credits to Paul Dietz, Jefferson Y. Han, John Barnwell, Jonathan Westhues and William Yerazunis.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=2310889848710041872&hl=en

Link to video on Google.

Submerging Technologies

True 3D “image”


Link to video

This might not look very impressive, but it is. By using lasers and all kinds of projection technologies we have seen different kinds of 3D images before, but all of them rely on something that reflect the light so that you can see the image.

Some of the most real looking and impressive versions of the holographic effects that you can see in movies like StarWars have been done using lasers and smoke in the room to reflect the image.

3D Display
Image copyright Burton-jp.com

But what if you want a 3D image to appear in thin air? With nothing to reflect the light? Nobody has done that before using laser plasma this way.

That’s why the simple dots of light that you can see in this video are impressive. This is the Nipkow Disk of the 21st century. We’re on to something here. Before you know it Princess Leia will be right in your room praying Obi-Wan to help her.

Credits go to:
Burton-jp, Uchi Yama – Keio University, AIST

True 3D “image”

The multi touch screen revisited

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf

Link to video.

I guess many of you have seen this video on YouTube already. An amazing piece of input device. It is on display here at Siggraph and I can’t say much more than WOW! After trying it I can confirm that it works just as well as it looks like in the video.

The guys behind it are setting up a company and hope to put it into production. Where can I buy shares?

The multi touch screen revisited

More videos from Siggraph 2001

This year’s Siggraph starts in less than a week. It’s time to finish off my little series of videos from the 2001 conference and make room for new and interesting stuff from Boston next week.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
First, another computer game controller experiment. You control the game by moving the different shapes in front of the screen. Link to video.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
And another pretty advanced multi player computer game. It’s 3D and is controlled by sensors in the 3D glasses and a special glove. Link to video.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
Then a little bit of art. You sit down in front of the screen with a headset with a microphone. Say a word, for example “elephant” and the system starts finding pictures of elephants on the internet and let them fly over the screen. Two persons can play at the same time. In each end of the screen. Then you can have pictures of elephants flying towards pictures of dogs… Link to video.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf
Then some physical movement communicated through the internet. Place the sensors somewhere, connect to the internet and place the second set another place on this planet, also connected. Move one of the sets and the other one will move exactly in the same manner.

Very nice if you want to wave goodnight to your grandmother in Japan through movement with a robot teddy bear. Link to video.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf

And last but not least, the scary vision. There is no water left on earth and all you have is this virtual shower. Fortunately, my camera didn’t get wet. Link to video.

More videos from Siggraph 2001

Amazing floating words

While preparing for Siggraph 2006 i went through my archives and found a couple of videos from my visit to Siggraph back in 2001. Some of the technology and art installations are still pretty amazing so I have decided to post a series of videos from that conference.

This one is from the art exhibition. The system consist of a couple of computers, a projector, a camera and a pool of water. The projector and the camera is mounted directly above the pool. One computer renders the characters and project them in the pool. Another computer is analyzing the video feed from the camera and control the animation of the words on basis of the movements of the elements in the picture. One is used to move the characters and the other one is used as an eraser.

Link to the video on YouTube.

You speak into a microphone and letters start to drip out of the funnel. Then you can have fun lifting the letters up, moving them around and erase them.

These kinds of alternative methods of controlling computers are quite interesting. Again, I have to think about Brian Eno and the wish for more “africa” in computers. Mentioned here at eirikso.com before. You also find some thoughts over at brilliantdays.com.

If you want to follow the rest of my videos from Siggraph 2001 I recommend subscribing to this blog through your RSS reader or through my email update. You find all the information you need here.

Credit goes to the artist Shinji Sasada, that will be back with some interesting stuff this year.

(If you want to link to this story you find an image that you can use here.)

Amazing floating words

The celebrity oystercatcher

Oystercatcher
If you are an oystercatcher and decides to place your nest on top of the science building of the university of Bergen you are up for some fame. A pair of oystercachers has decided that this is a good idea. They have been there several years and the very scientific people at the university distributed the hatching through a web cam last year. New this year is high quality live video streaming.

Due to the very long days during the Norwegian summer you will get quite nice shots even late evenings and early mornings. The picture in this article is from 10:42 PM.

The students and the people working at the university are serious about this, so both the webcam snapshot quality and the video streaming are of very high quality.

The eggs are estimated to hatch in the end of May / beginning of June. You’ll have to be there frequently because the kids leave their nest after a couple of days.

Link to the main page with web cam and instructions for the live streaming (english).

Link to a Norwegian article about the show.

Link to the wikipedia entry for oystercatcher

The live streaming is available on all platforms through the free VLC media player. Both as multicast and as unicast.

Digg this story here.

(Thanks to my mother for pointing me to this. Yes, my retired mother! Is that cool or what?)

The celebrity oystercatcher

Could YOUR computer help scientists look into the future?

A while ago, I read about The Global Consciousness Project over at RedNova News. Being a quite sceptical engeneer I usually don’t find experiments like these very interesting, but this one tickled my brain…

From RedNova:

“One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers – a one and a zero – in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.

The pattern of ones and noughts – ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ as it were – could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros – which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.

During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine’s usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.

It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.

Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, ‘forcing it’ to produce unequal numbers of ‘heads’ or ‘tails’.”

Read the story at RedNova and think about it. If you find it even remotely interesting then start experimenting with the idea that the data from random number generators could actually say something about global events when analyzed properly.

If the nodes are simple random number generators then you could easily turn your computer into a node. Someone should make a project like Seti out of this. A software that you could download to your computer and turn it into a node for this project. You would have millions of computers generating data to the project. It would be possible to add location to the data and see if changes are greater near the events that will make a change in the flow of numbers.

I also immediately start thinking about another wild project that I have suggested here before:
Everything you would ever want to see

Even for a sceptical engeneer it is important to sometimes let go of physics and what I base on current knowledge. If not for anything else, for creativity alone…

Could YOUR computer help scientists look into the future?