Comments on: a time for reflection

a time for reflection

krunk — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:08:10 -0800

Daniel Rozin makes mirrors. But not the boring ones we're used to -- he prefers to make his out of wood, trash and occassionally, shiny balls. His works are a combination of artistic expression and computer vision, and have been on display around the world. Check out the quicktime videos of his mirrors in action and prepare your mind to be boggled. [via cool/lame]

By: WolfDaddy

WolfDaddy — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:14:43 -0800

This is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy cool and Paint-Cam (Shockwave) is neat. Thanks!

By: lobakgo

lobakgo — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:57:35 -0800

Holy crap, those are nifty! Thanks krunk.

By: bonheur

bonheur — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 17:01:37 -0800

Holy moley! This is awesome. This quicktime movie of his "easel" piece blows my mind. Rockin'.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 17:36:13 -0800

Holy crap, that easel piece is freaky. How on earth does he do it? Blue/Green screen tricks?

By: piskycritter

piskycritter — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 18:10:47 -0800

How on earth does he do it? Just speculating here, but I'm guessing that the canvas is actually a rear-projection screen (note the low light levels). May be the canvas has sensors on it to locate the position of the brush. Hook all that up to a custom paint/Photoshop program, and it would be a simple enought affair to have the projected image revealed in a painterly fashion as the brush is moved across the screen. Again, just guessing. And of course, he thought of doing it first, wherein lies the art.

By: krunk

krunk — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 18:19:10 -0800

Holy crap, that easel piece is freaky. How on earth does he do it? Blue/Green screen tricks? My guess is: there's a projector behind the (thin) canvas, that ordinarily projects a black image onto the back of the canvas. when projectors display black, they don't actually emit any light. behind the canvas is also some sort of brush-detection device, be it pressure detection, brush-shadow detection via computer vision, etc... the projector then projects a portion of the image onto where the brush stroke has been applied, instead of projecting just black. And of course, the image is mirrored so the viewer sees it the correct way. We do a lot of computer vision-y stuff in my lab (Queen's University Human Media Lab), a more scientific application of this kind of stuff has been done by my colleague Alex... check out AuraMirror (pdf).

By: krunk

krunk — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 18:20:56 -0800

ah, piskycritter beat me to the punch

By: bonheur

bonheur — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 22:18:13 -0800

The hows and whys of the easel piece are explained a little bit more here.

By: Civil_Disobedient

Civil_Disobedient — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 03:09:06 -0800

OH MY FUCKING GOD. I've been working on something like this for the past year. I cannot believe -- CANNOT FUCKING BELIEVE that someone beat me to the punch. CRAP. And just to reiterate: Goddammitfuckingshitasspisschrist. Back to the GODDAMNED FUCKING drawing board. Oh, and the way it works (or at least, the way MINE was going to work) is you make a grid of blocks (or whatever) attached to linear actuators (or servos or whatever you prefer). Stepper motors from old floppy drivers are really good for this because of their accuracy after constant usage. Then you get an image into a computer -- it could be scanned it, it could be from a digital camera, it doesn't really matter. Then do two conversions: the first is to downsample the image into the a grid that's the same size as your grid (kinda like this, then convert the color image into a 256 color greyscale. Each color represents how far the motor is engaged. This is, like, the 15th brilliant idea I've had that's been completely STOLEN from my head.

By: Cerebus

Cerebus — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 07:11:10 -0800

This is the coolest shit I've seen all month. Especially that easel.

By: lumpenprole

lumpenprole — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 07:45:49 -0800

I had the good luck to wander into a gallery that had some pieces of his about a year ago. I have to say, the easel was neat, but got boring real fast. The trash mirror, however was incredible. People kept playing with it for hours. It was totally nonstop fascinating.

By: krunk

krunk — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 08:41:59 -0800

Sorry about that, Civil_Disobedient... but hey, better finding out now than when you're done, right? no? oh.