Will sits down to get his head scanned by the Lynx Labs handheld 3D scanner, which uses infrared cameras (like in the Kinect) to quickly generate models that can immediately be read by a 3D printer. The idea is that this portable scanner will just work for anyone, regardless of any computer modeling experience.
These days, I'm mostly using Netflix to watch Archer reruns and catch up on Mad Men, but if you're looking for something a little more cinematic, Indiewire cross-checked the results of their critic's survey of the best films of 2012 with the current availability on Netflix. It turns out, 19 of those films are on Netflix, including Bernie, Cabin in the Woods, and The Imposter. Be warned though! Watching more than a few may push those Real Housewives episodes off of your recommended list.
3Bill Doran, a friend of ours who makes videogame-themed props, has just launched a Kickstarter project for a space pistol prop. The pistol is Bill's original design, and he designed the kit to be modular so it can be painted and assembled any way you want, with extra room even for electronics and other custom bits. The unpainted kit comes at the $125 contribution level, which looks like a good way to get started with prop painting and weathering.
How awesome are RGB LEDs when put in the right hands? Just check out this animated pixel box project from our friend Jeremy Williams. And in case you're wondering, he's not making any for sale, though there's a similar project at http://ledpixelart.com
Picture the Star Wars logo. You know the one. All-caps. At the front, the S slides gracefully into the T. The feet on the Rs reach forward, grasping for perfect symmetry. Star Wars fans know it by heart. People who have never watched Star Wars know it through commercials and posters and advertising. And yet that iconic logo was hardly the first design applied to Star Wars. It was at least the fifth, as this fascinating look at the Star Wars logo's evolution (via Kottke) reveals.
Alex Jay dug through mounds of history on the Star Wars logo to lay bare its complex history, and each design along the path is awesome in its own way. The logo we all know evolved out of a decal designed by Ralph McQuarrie, featuring an early concept drawing of a blaster-and-lightsaber equipped Han Solo and the dramatic text "The Star Wars" underneath it in the font Futura Display. Joe Johnston, who worked at ILM at the time, did another logo treatment based on the font Precis Slim.
Tons of promotional materials from the film, pre-release, show off different font choices. The movie title eventually dropped the "the;" sometimes the words were stacked, sometimes displayed side-by-side. A novelization of the movie, a Marvel comic adaptation, and all kinds of brochures and magazine features use different versions of the logo, since they were created before the film was finished and hit theaters. In some of those materials, you can see the early version of Star Wars' iconic logo, which was designed by Suzy Rice.
Lucas asked Rice to design a "very fascist" logo, and she came up with the one we all know so well--almost. The font was hand-drawn, inspired by Helvetica Black, but the W was sharper; when they realized the W design didn't work well in the film's opening text crawl, Joe Johnston changed the W, and the icon was born. Still, Rice's version shows up in all kinds of ads printed before the movie.
And that wasn't the last time Rice's logo would be used. Jay discovered that logo, with its weirdly angular W, in paperbacks from Ballantine. Some publications would even use two different versions of the logo in a single book or ignore it in place of some other funky font. And even when the logo was fairly established, changes in perspective could completely alter its appearance, like in the design to the right.
Jay's blog post is full of tons of awesome artwork from decades of Star Wars material, and it's really amazing to see how much variation it had before, during, and after the film's release. And the post doesn't even delve into how the logos of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi changed--they almost certainly saw less variation, but you can still find a few different versions of each with only a quick search. You should absolutely read the rest of the post for more awesome images of The Star Wars.
Director Guillermo del Toro's upcoming giant-robots-vs.-giant-monsters movie Pacific Rim looks like a glorious exercise in computer generated effects. It's anime brought to life, or something akin to Godzilla, with elaborate 3D models standing in for guys in rubber puppet suits. But del Toro is known for relying on practical effects--costumes, makeup, and insanely detailed models--for his films like Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth. Even in a movie starring 40-foot-tall robots, del Toro couldn't leave everything up to computer graphics.
For Pacific Rim, del Toro and his crew designed a four-story-tall set for the actors fighting inside the Jaegers, the film's giant ass-kicking robots. They built the entire robot head (called a Conn-pod rig in the movie) that the actors stand inside in the movie, designing it to shake and rock back and forth and drop up to 15 feet in a snap, all to link the actors to the CG fight scene that would be taking place on screen.
Aside from the cockpit's main window, there's no green-screen going on in the set. The actors really are wearing armor and helmets, with their arms and legs attached to a two-ton contraption meant to move the robot's limbs. A short video featurette shows off the entire construction--it's an awesome look at what del Toro casually calls "a torture machine."
A feature in Variety about Pacific Rim details how the cockpit set worked, and it's even more elaborate than it looks. It's one big puppeteering rig:
"The Conn-pod rigs appear to be under the control of the actors, but were actually controlled by [Shane] Mahan and puppeteers from Legacy Effects, who followed the actors’ movements as they operated the apparatus offscreen. 'We had to dress the people into the thing, take care of them, make sure things are working, jump back down, and operate the machine,' says Mahan. 'The hard part was fitting the machines to the actors, making sure that they were comfortable enough to act in them and coaching them through this very difficult time.'
The actors would also be drenched regularly with hundreds of gallons of water to simulate the fictional weather conditions of the film, which meant the entire cockpit rig--full of electronics and machinery--had to be waterproofed to make sure no one was electrocuted on-set.
Adam adds: "I got to visit the Pacific Rim set in Toronto last year and spent a day seeing all the sets they had up. My favorite was the motion control gimbal for these heads. It's enormous. Incredible. The scale is awesome. My second favorite was the 'Armor Trailer' where Shane from Legacy Effects showed me some of the advancements they'd made for wearable armor that they'd learned making three movies worth of costumes for the Iron Man films. It was a film buff's fantasy camp."
Arduino debuted a new programmable robotics platform at this year's Maker Faire, designed to be enhanced with sensors and easily programmable with sample code. We chat with Arduino co-founder David Cuartielles about how the Arduino robot is a good entry to robotics and why it's unlike the Arduino microcontrollers you may be familiar with.
Shopbot was showing off their newest power tool at MakerFaire 2013, the Handibot. Will gets a quick demo of the new machine, which Shopbot bills as a new kind of power tool. It's designed to bring the power of CNC to shops that are too small to host a full-sized CNC router.
Will tours the amazing Nautilus Submarine Art Car, a project of the Five Ton Crane artist collective. The roving land-submarine was entirely custom designed and constructed, with a surprising number of high-tech features like RFID security, GPS navigation, and even iPad interface controls. It also has a harpoon water gun cannon!
There’s no denying that the forward march of progress has changed every aspect of our lives, and the arts are no exception. Sure, there are plenty of artists who use digital media, mechanical devices and other technology as intended to create art, but there are also outliers, innovators and experimenters who use it differently. Let’s look at ten artists who tap into tech in unexpected fashion.
Scott Parenteau, a commercial welder, made this mammoth walking pod inspired by his love for geodesic dome designs and Theo Jansen's Strandbeest machines. This lumbering robot gracefully strolls across the pavement, powered by two commercial dishwasher gear motors!
Friend of Tested and pinball fanatic Jeremy Williams stops by the office to show off his latest project: an Arduino-powered system to add programmable lights to pinball playfield boards. This custom kit, which Jeremy invented, turns old pinball machines into amazing animated wall displays.
This weekend, LEGO has placed their largest LEGO model ever in Times Square--a 1:1 scale ratio of an X-wing fighter. It contains 5 MILLION bricks, assembled around a supporting steel frame and was shipped from the Czech Republic to New York in 32 separate pieces. To give you an idea of the scale size-up, each individual LEGO stud on the X-wing is a 42 x 42 normal studs across.
Both The Brothers Brick and Gizmodo have great writeups about their trips to see the X-wing in the hangar where it was assembled. If you're in New York, you should head down to Times Square this weekend, so you can hop in the cockpit and get your picture taken inside this unique piece of history.
When we first got our Makerbot Replicator last year, I was really excited about the promise of using the dual-extrusion machine to make more complex prints. Why add a second print head? In the beginning, the ability to print multiple colors of plastic, without having to swap filament mid-print was compelling. And while I did manage to print a handful of test designs using black and white filament on the Replicator, the process to prepare models for a dual-head print involved splitting the different colored parts of a model into two separate STL files, making each of them printer-ready separately, merging them in ReplicatorG, and then adding a couple of additional steps to the already lengthy slicing process. It kind of sucked.
Enter MakerWare, Makerbot’s custom, mostly-closed source ReplicatorG replacement. While Makerware lacked dual-extrusion support at launch, it was added earlier this year. Since the update, I reconfigured our printer so it was running PLA on one head and ABS on the other—this makes printing using whichever material I want much more convenient. However, I hadn’t had a chance to test it out printing multiple colors on a single object using Makerware. I picked up a couple of fresh spools of ABS last weekend at MakerFaire, and figured that was as good an excuse as any to try dual-extrusion again.
My first multi-color attempt using Makerware was one of the gorgeous multi-color vases listed on Thingiverse (also pictured above). I set it up using the highest resolution setting, 0.1mm, which is what I usually use for prints today. Users of Makerware probably know that the Low and Medium print quality settings use MiracleGrue, Makerbot’s proprietary slicing engine, while the High quality setting uses ReplicatorG. MiracleGrue is dramatically faster than ReplicatorG, but it produces prints that are much lower quality (0.27mm vertical resolution vs. 0.1mm). I wanted to test both MiracleGrue and ReplicatorG with multi-color prints.
The difference in speed was quite remarkable.
We test MaceTech's programmable LED glasses at this year's Bay Area Maker Faire. The glasses are basically a printed circuit board with single-color LED lights, which can be programmed to animate and display any message you want.
The Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2 has always been one of my favorite video game guns, both in terms of design as well as use. It was always amazing to me that it took almost eight years for accomplished prop builders to take a crack at it, given how iconic both the weapon and the game are to the broader gaming community.
In December 2012, I decided to start on a build of it myself.
For the uninitiated, the Gravity Gun is one of the primary weapons and tools that you use in the video game Half-Life 2. It allows you to pick up and throw various objects in the game. You only get to see it from the 3rd person in a few instances, thankfully one of which is when another character in the game is holding it.
You can see the size of the weapon here, and I used this image to help determine the scale used when building everything. Coming from a 3D design background, my primary prototype building methods utilize laser cutting and 3D printed parts. Props from video games make the first steps easy, since in most cases you can easily extract a game model into a workable format. However there are a few caveats to this:
I love Guillermo's work--he's a genius at creating scary but understandable villains and heroes over the course of his filmography. The fact that he's brought his amazing knowledge of what makes us human and flawed into the sphere of giant fighting robots has me thrilled beyond belief about Pacific Rim.
For a robot the size of a shoebox, OpenROV has made quite a splash in the submersible community in the past year. Just after MakerFaire 2012, where we saw OpenROV for the first time, it and its creator Eric Stackpole showed up in the New York Times along with a bold proclamation about the open source project: "It could change the future of ocean exploration."
Those weren't Stackpole's words, but you can bet he believes them--his quest for a sub-$1000 exploration bot recently landed him on the cover of Make Magazine, and OpenROV was back at this year's Maker Faire. Last August, Stackpole and his partner David Lang raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter for the OpenROV. What's surprising, considering how successful OpenROV was in 2012, is just how far the ROV has advanced in the past year.
"Even when we were doing that expedition to the Hall City Cave that ended up in the Times, we didn't really have a robot that was fully functional," says Stackpole at Maker Faire 2013. "You know, this is a maker product. It was on its way, there were some things that could work. We could drive it around, but the video feed wasn't reliable. Now we're at a point where we have everything we had dreamed of. Live video streaming, we can do high definition, it's going up to a computer. It's functional. This is the part where it really gets exciting. This is where we're going to start exploring, really exploring, places that haven't been seen before."
Stackpole is a fountain of enthusiasm, but he's earnest when he says things like "this is the part where it really gets exciting," he means it. His obsession with ocean exploration came while he worked at NASA as a mechanical engineer, and last year he reduced his hours to devote more time to OpenROV.
Just in the past few months, the OpenROV project has made a major breakthrough.
Norm test flies The Viper 2.0, a Battlestar Galactica-themed full-motion flight simulator built by teenage makers for Maker Faire 2013. This year's Viper project includes upgrades to the simulation software and added operator controls to give pilots a challenge when dogfighting Cylons. Seat belts required!
Recently, we’ve seen some buzz about Dolby Atmos, a relatively new movie theater sound technology that gives the illusion that there are an infinite number of audio speakers and channels surrounding the audience. It’s hard to believe we didn’t even have wide-spread Dolby Stereo in movies until Star Wars, and if theaters wanted to play Lucas’s space opera, they had to redo their sound system, or Fox wouldn’t give them the film reels.
Several years prior to Dolby Stereo, studios also experimented with a short-lived experiment in movie sound that’s fun to look back on today: Sensurround. It was a gimmick of its time, because the era of the all-star disaster film was in full swing, and while Sensurround wasn’t as high tech as Lucasfilm's THX or Dolby's Atmos, it did try to make movies feel bigger and more realistic through the sheer power of sound, and perhaps helped pave the way for today’s cinema audio technology.
Sensurround was the brainchild of the late Jennings Lang, a Hollywood producer who knew the power of showmanship. Lang was one of the first to call a film an “event” back in 1974 for Earthquake, and legend has it the idea for the film was based on a true event. Lang was in a movie theater when a real life earthquake happened. Then Lang got the idea about making a disaster film where an earthshaker hits L.A., and it would somehow shake the hell out of the audience as well.
“My dad was one of the last true showmen,” says his son, Rocky Lang. “He realized that movies had to be bigger and more event oriented. He was always trying to find a way to make the movie going experience bigger and better.”
"ATTENTION! This motion picture will be shown in the startling new multi-dimension of Sensurround. Please be aware that you will feel as well as see and hear realistic effects such as might be experienced in an actual earthquake. The management assumes no responsibility for the physical or emotional reactions of the individual viewer."- Theater Notice For Earthquake (1974)
By setting up a series of speakers in the theater, and running a soundtrack with very low tones, an earthquake simulation could be done, and there were cues on the Earthquake soundtrack when the special speakers were to be triggered.
