The October issue of Popular Mechanics just hit the stands, with the next in the series of Radio Shack ads I’ve been working on:
This one describes how to build an “Atari Punk Console”—a simple DIY analog synthesizer.
See also:
Projects
Hyper-3D Time-Lapse
A friend sent me a link to today’s xkcd, which inspired me to post about a project I’ve been working on off and on over the last year or so. The comic describes the use of 2 cameras placed at a great distance apart, which are then viewed through via a pair of improvised video goggles. The result is a greatly exaggerated sense of stereoscopic depth. It’s as if you are a giant, with eyes a hundred feet apart, looking at tiny little clouds.
My project uses the same idea, but instead of using live video cameras, I use a pair of digital still cameras set far apart to create hyper-stereocopic time-lapse movies (geeky details below). I shot a bunch of these around San Francisco. They’re viewable on youtube:
Blinkybugs in Popular Mechanics
This is the first in a series of “advertorial” pieces that I’m writing for a Radio Shack campaign, appearing as two-page spreads in Popular Mechanics over the next few months. The first one is just hitting newsstands now, and is based on a familiar subject (click to make it huge):
Future pieces will be about other DIY projects, as well as on cool, geeky groups of people doing interesting things. So far it’s been a really fun project to work on, and I think it’s good that Radio Shack is trying to reconnect with its DIY roots.
As part of the same campaign, I’ll also be appearing in some online videos, talking about projects like these along with my friend Meredith. These should be out within the next couple months.
Recent Events: Create:Fixate and MAPP
I recently showed some of my time-lapse pieces (A History the Sky and two panoramic time-lapses) at a couple events. A few weeks ago I drove down to L.A. for Create:Fixate, a one-night show of art and music. They were nice enough to build me this nice double-wide projection screen for my dual-projector setup (pro tip: silver spandex stretched over a wooden frame makes a great projection surface):
Panoramic Time-Lapse Movies
I recently acquired some fun new toys, the first of which is a motorized telescope mount that’s popular among time-lapse enthusiasts. Time-lapse movies are usually fairly static, but this makes it possible to introduce movement such as panning shots.
I’ve been using it to create panoramic time-lapse movies. Here’s my first attempt, shot from a hillside near my house (it looks best full-screen at 720p or 1080p):
The camera snapped an image every five seconds while the motorized mount slowly rotated, making a single rotation in 90 minutes. I assembled the images into this panoramic movie, in which each “pane” is actually the same movie, slightly offset in time. The panes combine to make a single 360-degree view.
I shot this next movie on a Friday night in front of a busy cafe in the Mission:
New Website and Blog! Hizzah!
I’m launching this fetching new Murphlab web site, along with this blog to take over where my previous sadly neglected blog left off (I can partially blame Blogger).
Murphlab.com is home for my various projects, which include a A History of the Sky, Blinkybugs, and some less ambitious efforts.
More soon. Really.
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