No knock on the artist, I particularly like the pom-pom display, but I get the sense that much of art today is about going roundabout ways, almost Rube Goldberg machine like, to achieve things could be presented in other ways with minimal effort. Sometimes this alternative mediation is interesting, but sometimes it almost feels dismissive of the metaphysical magic that is computing.
I mean, the resulting painting as done by Pollock or Mondriaan is pretty silly. Just splash some paint in a canvas, or draw some lines and use the "fill bucket tool" to create colored squares, right?
Yes, sure, it's about the process and about the inescapable context with postmodern conceptual art. Whether it's mere splashes I will leave aside, but Pollock and Mondrian precisely brought the consideration of the process to a new light, that's part of what makes them significant figures. Mondrian didn't have mspaint.exe, those geometries meant something different at the time. Also, I don't think Picasso would have been so infatuated by cubism if computers with triangle mesh rendering and solid modeling had been around.
> to achieve things could be presented in other ways with minimal effort
You could imagine the art piece with minimal effort: no effort spent in making it.
So in a way that's the purest form of art by your criticism.
If only there was some way to achieve this, we'd be done.
These isn't a similar effect but your link is very cool. I think the magic here is a static array of mirrors printed to create an image on another surface from multiple reflections of a bright source light.
I’ve always been interested in making large works of art out of many many small things(LED cubes, wooden blocks, etc…). Would love to explore these kinds of things more
What an absolutely amazing piece of work, and even more incredible that it worked the first time. If I had to do something like that it would take me at least three tries to get it to work and quite possibly more than three. Math, 3D printing, love, what's not to like :)
20 hours into printing the final mirror array frame he realized it was backwards and would have displayed "?EM YRRAM". So he had to scrap that and restart his print. So let's call that a try. ;-)
Even simple stuff takes me multiple tries. I don’t know how any engineer gets a design right the first time. I can build it in a 3D design app, look all around it, and STILL see something in the prototype that was not obvious in the design.
I just built something I had to get right on the first try because messing it up would be more than a little dangerous. Endless fitting and testing and re-thinking before committing to building it. A little cheating was involved, I built a 1/17th scale test setup to ensure that all the electrical bits would work.
Yes, it works. Test rides three days ago, first real trip yesterday, 65 km there and back on a single charge. Write-up one of these days, have to collect all the material.
I've never actually been scared of stuff I built before, that's a first (and that doesn't mean that I shouldn't have been scared with other projects, just that I wasn't either because I wasn't aware they were dangerous or simply too absorbed to stop and think about it).
Very large battery pack for an e-bike. I'll do a write-up soon, still have to collect all the pictures and the text. It works incredibly well but it took way too long to make.
I have gotten designs first-time right multiple times in my career, and in fact more often first-time right than not. And so for both hardware and software.
For the last few years however I have gradually been loosing that and have started going easier on myself when I discover a mistake.
The requirement to get it right in the first time is more stringent for integrated circuit designers (which I have been too) as cycle times are in months. It is true that several tools are set up around this to help find issues before designs are sent out for fabrication. However, the tools are not perfect, and considerable insights, eye for detail and perfectionism and are still required to make a design work in the first shot.
This is future of the street art. Mount it using liquid nails to some place that is hard to access and point it somewhere where lots of people will see it during rush hour.
Eg.: You can install it in such way that parliament building will get defaced every day during lunch hours by mounting on near building or tall lamp post. Or maybe put it on your own roof, that way nobody can remove it :-)
Wild, the police thought that the LED display, that had already been up for 4 weeks, might be a bomb, and then they somehow spent a million dollars handling the 'threat'.
Wilder still, Turner bought off the police after for 2 million dollars, and then censored the creators from releasing an episode critical of the Boston police response.
If you ask yourself where the money comes from, who gets to decides to spend it, and how much fun the police had playing with their toys, it all seems to make good sense.
That's not the unnerving part (answer would be "probably nothing"). The unnerving part is convincing the people in the black SUVs that you actually haven't been doing anything suspicious. While they tear your house apart. And take all of your stuff. And have you handcuffed on the floor.
One of my friends used to live across the street from a federal courthouse. He tried projecting a movie from his window onto a blank wall of the courthouse. Half an hour later several LEOs were at his door asking him "politely but firmly" to turn off the projector and to never do it again.
Has anyone seen the mirror array that was built with ~2"X2"stainless steel mirrors that are attached to a sheet of blue spring steel that was laser cut as a compliant mechanism for each mirror so when an offset wheel on a threaded bolt behind the mirror is turned it progressively tilts the mirror from a minimal angle to a maximum angle? Each bolt was then driven using a single stepper motor(one mirror adjustment motor for the whole array, kind of a budget build, instead of one motor per mirror)on a belt driven x-y frame. The mirror array was positioned horizontally 2' off the floor of a museum with works of art, a camera is then pointed at an angle near eyelevel probably 20' away from the array. Then you choose an art work and the mirrors are rotated through their angles and when that pixel(mirror) reflects the color back to the camera that matches the art work you chose it stops moves to the next mirror and then repeats until there is a full image made of reflected light. Obviously the final image is pixelated but roughly resembles the original work. I saw this years ago and can no longer find any of it online. I've tried every search combination I could think of. Some of these details might be wrong but I'm just going off memory here. Pls help
I have been thinking about this for some time: cylinders each attached to a motor. The glossy end of the cylinders is cut at an angle. The rotation of each cylinder dictates from which direction light is reflected.
'two minute papers' has a link to a free course on how to do this. I haven't checked them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r-eIKkyAco Note: the title says 3d printing but it's actually milling acryllic sheets, not SLA
I'm wondering if a similar effect couldn't be done using a continuous surface and just silvering it. I saw something similar done with refraction but can't remember the URL now. 3D printers definitely have higher resolution than mirrors of this size.
If you're willing to spend a lot of money on silver then probably yes. After all the height differences are substantial and silver isn't cheap. 3D printers resolution sucks in comparison to the mirrors, I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Not quite sure you need that much silver. You need some filler between the silver layer and the crude plastic surface to get the silvering smooth, but that filler doesn't necessarily need to be silver. As for the resolution, I'm judging it from this picture: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bencbartlett/3D-printed-mi... - there seems to be almost two orders of magnitude of a difference between the size of a flat mirror and the size of the "printing step".
For that matter, you could probably glue down pieces of aluminized mylar rather than using mirrors, since you all you need is a spot of light, not a full-blown mirror image. Aluminized mylar is pretty cheap!
Bare aluminum would oxidize in a very short time to something dull. It would still reflect light but not quite as good.
Aluminized Mylar would definitely work, but that's not bare aluminum but aluminum with a shiny layer over it to keep it clean.
Very useful stuff, I built huge solar concentrators with it. 1000 suns on an area the size of a poststamp. You can do some pretty crazy stuff with that kind of energy density.
You might need a micron of thickness of aluminum or silver. This piece looks like it's about 300 mm x 300 mm, which would work out to 90 mm³ of silver (or aluminum), which at 10.5 g/cc would work out to 950 mg of silver. Silver currently costs US$25.25 per troy ounce, so this would be 0.12¢ (US$0.0012) of silver, or somewhat less of aluminum.
Both silver and aluminum will tarnish if exposed to the air, silver more slowly but much more completely.
The process for silvering things is a lot easier to do at small scales than the process for aluminizing them. Aluminizing things normally requires a fairly good vacuum, and, moreover, a vacuum chamber large enough to fit whatever you're aluminizing. Perhaps someone will come up with some kind of convenient wet process for doing it but I'm not hoding my breath.
By contrast, you can silver glass with Tollens' test, using distilled water, silver nitrate, concentrated aqueous ammonia, hydroxide of potassium or sodium, and a reducing sugar (almost any sugar that isn't sucrose, for which you can substitute numerous other chemicals, such as formaldehyde, formate, isopropanol, or tartrate). This is commonly done as a classroom demonstration in chemistry labs nowadays, and it was done on a large scale almost 150 years ago for telescope mirrors. Nitric acid is beneficial but, unless you have to make the silver nitrate, not essential.
This is why it's much more common for amateur telescope makers to silver their mirrors rather than aluminizing them.
Well, as usual, you probably know more than I do about what I'm writing about. Am I overlooking something significant? I don't even know if you can use the Tollens test to silver copper.
There are single solution spray-on electroless plating "paint" for modelmaking. They can make any smooth and black surface into a mirror so I think it's just a matter of surface preparations.
You could use reflective mylar tape over the surface. And if you wanted something with very high resolution I'd try vacuum forming wide mylar film onto the 3D printed surface.
This is very cool. Perhaps I'll similarly do a writeup of my nerdy marriage trick -- I created custom 3D chocolate bars with our faces on them to hand out to guests. It required a ton of iteration and a lot of chocolate work (which is really hard!), but was really special in the end.
Almost trivial, if you're prepared to make the mirrors a bit bigger. I've got a 7-element array on my workbench right now. You want two servos per mirror, one for each axis. I'm using flexures for linkages between the servos and the mirrors, and universal joints made of magnets and ball bearings to hold everything together. The mirror tiles I'm using are 110mm across, flat-to-flat, which are bigger than this example, and that makes layout and assembly straightforward in a way that it wouldn't be if everything was smaller. Everything's printed in PETG, raspberry pi pico for brains driving a pca9685 PWM driver over i2c. The linkage geometry is the only hard part, the CAD and printing was pretty much a one-weekend project.
Should probably point out that with 2 servos per mirror you can match surface normals but not surface offsets. You can make each individual mirror match the gradient of a curve, but you can't make a curve like the parabolic dish in the GitHub link without a third servo per mirror. I'm waiting for more parts to arrive for that...
This is quite a bit different. DLP like projectors are binary: straight forward or somewhere away. The layout of the grid of mirrors matches the layout of the dots you can illuminate, in the image. Something like OP has would require some pretty serious angular precision.
I think the beautify of the mirror system is that it's direct, understandable/observable, and nice to look at by itself, even if it's not showing an image. It's elegant. If you use beam formers and DLPs, you're just making an overcomplicated DLP projector that's going to look like an overcomplicated DLP projector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwCmzwSE98o&list=RDCMUCUbDcU... I don't know if you would need a server for each mirror? but you would need.... two axis of rotation? and making a mechanical system that slowly moved mirror by mirror to update the position might be more complex.
I wonder if rather than "additive" you could do similar with "subtractive" fabrication. Take a wooden board and cnc mill and cut circles on the surface at the appropriate orientations.
yes, but it'd require a redesign or very special tooling.
that spacing between each mirror 'pedestal' is fairly deep, it'd require a very long end-mill or a five axis machine to be able to get into those crevices.
it'd be trivial to carve the needed angle into each 'mirror pedestal' , but the current design doesn't support the premise very well.. still, doable.
How about this approach. Just have a collection of wooden dowels with one end milled to be concave at one of 20 or 30 angles. Then you can assemble whatever mirror array you want by selecting and positioning the appropriate dowels.
Or sold as a kit made out of plastic hex shaped rods that snap together.
generally it's just a matter of slicing the same source STL file to the appropriate gcode, but in this case the particular geometry (lots of sharp concave angles) seems more suited to additive manufacturing.
In a less-artistic application, you could use this idea to print multiple sections that could be assembled to make a large pseudo-parabolic mirror for a solar concentrator. You wouldn't get telescope-quality imaging, certainly, but if all you needed was to concentrate a lot of light on a small space (for a steam generator, say) it should work fine.
It's possible to create artificial light with parallel rays like the sun, you just need a parabolic dish mirror. So in theory yes you could do this at home for everyday projections, just not with the sun.
At a risk of spoiling a startup idea, I'd love a set of motorized mirrors I could put on a roof of a house on the other side of the street from me, that would send sunlight to the eastern side of my flat during the afternoon :).
Yes. It's pretty interesting they went the "projector" way.
I guess there is an issue of the arrow not being lit enough to stand out if the mirror flatly reflects ambient light, it would need to focus a lot more light, which would also make it much bigger.
It might also be that the additional light from the arrow is just beneficial in that specific case.
I might be getting old but this is the sort of magic by technology I would like to see more of in the world instead of using tech to try putting people into fake worlds in some metaverse.
I don't think the particular metaverses available right now seem that good, but I don't share the consistent prejudices against virtual reality. Why is real reality any better? You can build awesome stuff in virtual reality as well (in fact, you can build almost anything imaginable, at a much lower cost).
Keeping in touch with reality is extremely important (because we are bound by its rules after all), but virtual existence has enormous potential as well :)
(that can't be realized, and certainly not realized for everyone, in the world of atoms -- virtual reality is delightfully egalitarian)
Just a thought, but one reason to be skeptical of virtual reality, if only out of pragmatism, is that unlike "real" reality, virtual reality is trivially controllable by single entities.
Maybe not an intrinsic limitation, but for the foreseeable future, VR = a domain where some entity like Facebook is effectively omniscient and omnipotent.
It could be, but I'm willing to bet it'll be primarily used to oppress and control people. The potential for things like VR and AR is great, but the reality is that it will be used against you in ways that couldn't have been possible without it.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're trying to avoid flamewars here, and I'm sure you can make your substantive points without that.
I mean, I don't think the parent post was that substantive either. There is nothing in this submission that necessitates roping in the topic of the metaverse. They could have just left it as they found this tech interesting.
Sure, but there are degrees of these things. The GP comment was generic, which does have a bad effect on discussion (it evokes shallower and often nastier things from others), but the comment I replied to took things a few notches further.
