You think Aqua Teen Hunger Force are Terrists? Wait'll you see THIS!

February 20, 2007 9:42 PM

You think these were bad? Wait till the terrists get these!
posted by pjern (30 comments total)

Fucking Awesome. Where are the schematics?
posted by odinsdream at 9:46 PM on February 20, 2007

schematics. i am so sick of links to these guys. but this is super dope.
posted by phaedon at 9:47 PM on February 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

I cracked up when the guy wrote his PIN number...
posted by miss lynnster at 9:48 PM on February 20, 2007

They even model the paint drip effect. Nice.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:50 PM on February 20, 2007

Holy cow! This is amazing and should be available to every 16 year old.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:53 PM on February 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

V cool. Will this totally blind people in the apartments, or merely partially detach their retinas?
posted by lalochezia at 9:55 PM on February 20, 2007

The trrsts are gonna attack us with Don Carlos?
posted by afx114 at 9:56 PM on February 20, 2007

Brilliant. Brilliantbrilliantbrilliant.
posted by mediareport at 10:05 PM on February 20, 2007

"Weapon of Mass Defacement" Hah.
posted by pjern at 10:07 PM on February 20, 2007

Whoa. I want one so bad I can taste it.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:08 PM on February 20, 2007

Blinding Me With Science, indeed.
posted by Dizzy at 10:16 PM on February 20, 2007

Don't look at beam with remaining eye.
posted by hortense at 10:17 PM on February 20, 2007

The first thing I thought when I saw this was that they were using a laser to do the projection. (the BoingBoing link originially suggested this.) But the display is just a plain old digital projector. There is however a danger of being blinded by the little green dot. They used a really strong laser because they were projecting on a faraway building and the dot needed to be bright enough to be picked up by an attached camera.

The upshot is there's no reason I can see why this wouldn't scale down for use with an ordinary cheap-o pointer, a cheap projector, a relatively cheap camera, and one wall of your basement. Which is the awesome part.
posted by PercussivePaul at 10:31 PM on February 20, 2007

I don't think it's dangerous, except that the laser pointer could conceivably catch someone in the eye. Someone ("Aidee") wrote in to BoingBoing to say:

Just a correction re the article, in that I thought initially a laser was being used to "paint" the building also. What happens instead, is that a handheld laser-pointer is used to tag the building and a camera discerns the contrast of the laser on the building to then output through a DLP video projector the actual tag. The DLP projector is doing the grunt work of projection and not the laser -- much safer!!

posted by grobstein at 10:31 PM on February 20, 2007

Rats, foiled again. On failure to preview. . . .
posted by grobstein at 10:32 PM on February 20, 2007

Very high coolness factor aside: I can't imagine this will go over well with the Authorities(TM) here in the Untied States of Amerika.
posted by pjern at 10:49 PM on February 20, 2007

and they said the only thing lasers were fun for was for playing with cats......
posted by peewinkle at 10:50 PM on February 20, 2007

Yeah, it was the "drip" effect that won me over. Awesome.
posted by Hadroed at 10:53 PM on February 20, 2007

Big, brother. From the Washington Post, February 1, 1999 — What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad?

What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam, a senior Air Force officer asked in 1990?

According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram idea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air.

But doing so over the skies of Iraq? To project such a hologram over Baghdad on the order of several hundred feet, they calculated, would take a mirror more than a mile square in space, as well as huge projectors and power sources.

And besides, investigators came back, what does Allah look like?

The Gulf War hologram story might be dismissed were it not the case that washingtonpost.com has learned that a super secret program was established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "project information power from space ... for special operations deception missions."

The USAF's Air University has a few more details about the airborne holographic projector concept.
posted by cenoxo at 11:57 PM on February 20, 2007

This is pretty fucking sweet, leagues better than that lame LED Throwie shit they were prattling on about for months.
posted by blasdelf at 12:10 AM on February 21, 2007

the phrase "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" has rarely been so true.
posted by arialblack at 12:34 AM on February 21, 2007

From the concert footage I've seen, Europeans have no problem shooting lasers at people.
posted by smackfu at 5:48 AM on February 21, 2007

that is so fucking badass.
posted by shmegegge at 6:56 AM on February 21, 2007

I wasn't prepared to see something that cool this early in the morning.
posted by ColdChef at 6:58 AM on February 21, 2007

That is a wicked pisser! Boston would shit itself if someone started doing that up there. LOLBOSTONIANS!!!11!!
posted by Mister_A at 8:00 AM on February 21, 2007

I WANT ONE.
posted by tkchrist at 8:53 AM on February 21, 2007

Isn't that Boston? Or is that bridge just like the one in Boston.
posted by odinsdream at 9:20 AM on February 21, 2007

Check out the Revolution Lounge at the Mirage in Vegas. They use a similar technology on their bar tables. You place your drink on the table and lights converge around it. You can "draw" on the table with your finger using various design elements. It's quite entertaining. Check out some pics here.
posted by afx114 at 9:27 AM on February 21, 2007

OMG the pain if anyone tried pulling that shit in America. As soon as the police chopper triangulated that light source, that projector Winnebago would be dismantled down to the bolts and the perpetrators would be busy having cattle prods rammed up their asses for "transmitting coded messages to the enemy."

Still, it's really cool, despite all the frightened mothers handwringing over lasers + eyeballs.
posted by quite unimportant at 10:17 AM on February 21, 2007

At first I was pretty convinced that was Boston. The building looked somewhat familiar and the bridge looks a lot like the Zakim/Bunker Hill bridge. There's also a structure that looks an awful lot like the Fleet Center. Turns out that it's the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam.
posted by feloniousmonk at 2:08 AM on February 26, 2007