This is a compelling use of AI for photographic manipulation (in my mind more practical than many of the other AI image generation examples that are flooding the art websites these days): basically the software can analyze a photograph, use AI to generate a pretty accurate depth map of the subject of the photo, and then use that for dynamic relighting (allowing you to add different artificial lights, color gels, etc.). You can try the web-based demo on your own photos! Neat.
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Gold, an acrylic + light sculpture by Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab, capturing the marker movement of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s handwriting. The way the projected light spirals through the acrylic is beautiful!
Translation: sheets of entirely flexible, waterproof, implantable LEDs. Yes, yes, medical and biotech applications, but imagine how interesting the tattoos at raves will be in a few years!
From Scientific American’s writeup:
As a demonstration of the technology the researchers put LED arrays through any number of experimental implementations. They deposited LEDs on aluminum foil, the leaf of a tree, and a sheet of paper; they wrapped arrays around nylon thread and tied it in a knot; and they distended LED arrays by inflating the polymer substrate or stretching it over the tip of a pencil or the head of a cotton swab. “Eventually the students just got tired” of devising new tests for the light-emitting sheets, Rogers says. “There was nothing that we tried that we couldn’t do.”
To be filed under “research I like reading about even if I don’t quite understand how it works”, new studies from the University of Oregon into altering and controlling the color of light on the scale of individual photons in fiber optic signalling:
In experiments led by Raymer’s doctoral student Hayden J. McGuinness, researchers used two lasers to create an intense burst of dual-color light, which when focused into the same optical fiber carrying a single photon of a distinct color causes that photon to change to a new color. This occurs through a process known as Bragg scattering, whereby a small amount of energy is exchanged between the laser light and the single photon, causing its color to change. […]
“In the first study, we worked with one photon at a time with two laser bursts to change the energy and color without using hydrogen molecules,” he said. “In the second study, we took advantage of vibrating molecules inside the fiber interacting with different light beams. This is a way of using one strong laser of a particular color and producing many colors, from blue to green to yellow to red to infrared.”
The laser pulse used was 200 picoseconds long. A picosecond is one-trillionth of a second. Combining the produced light colors in such a fiber could create pulses 200,000 times shorter – a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second).
(Via ACM TechNews)
This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world.
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
We’ve collected some of the best images from the project and made a book of them you can buy: http://bit.ly/mfmbook
Read more at the Dentsu London blog:
http://www.dentsulondon.com/blog/2010/09/14/light-painting/
and at the BERG blog:
http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/14/magic-ipad-light-painting/
From Dentsu London, Making Future Magic:
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
Take that, Picasso.
A paper in Optics Express describing a quantum dot-powered “dark pulse” laser. I was totally hoping that this was a device that could emit some kind of anti-light to darken the room, but what they’re really talking about is a laser that can go from light to dark very fast. The on/off pulses are down in the 90-picosecond range, useful for even more precise timekeeping or for new innovations in networking / telecom.
(Via The Register)
Moving things (very, very, very tiny things) using nothing but photons. Not immediately useful given the scale, but this is a first and could have applications in nanoelectromechanics and biology. Originally this same principle was thought to be what powered the nifty Crookes radiometer (that black-and-white vaned vacuum bulb thing that’s now usually sold as a novelty desk toy), but that device is actually moved by thermal transpiration or temperature differences.
(If the above link is behind a paywall for you, you might try the basic Nature writeup instead)
Real-time 3D capture at 60fps using a cheap webcam and simple projected pattern of light points. The structured-light code is open source, looks like a pretty cool project.
(Via Make)
There’s lots of conspiracy theory nutjobs talking about the HAARP research project lately (even Hugo Chavez is throwing his hat in), so the allegations of death-ray and mind control weapons tinges this science news a bit, but there’s something kind of beautiful about being able to generate your own version of the aurora borealis:
Artificial auroras can be created using an array of high-frequency transmitters. Researchers have previously done this by pumping a 3.6-megawatt beam of radio waves into the ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere a few hundred kilometres above Earth’s surface. The beam was powerful enough to break electrons free of their parent atoms, creating an artificial aurora similar to that of the Northern Lights.
It’s certainly an unusual way to leave your mark on the world, and I presume it’s harmless, given that we’re being constantly bombarded by the same kind of energy raining down from space (right?). Just so long as they aren’t cutting their way into heaven a la Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass, I guess…
(Found in Nature, which cites research in Geophysical Research Letters, but I can’t find the cited article anywhere. Maybe it was pulled? Aha, a conspiracy!)
I hate to steal links from the Make blog multiple times in a single day, but this is another one that’s hard to pass up. French product/industrial designer Aïssa Logerot created an LED-tipped fake spray can for doing a bit of light (photo) graffiti. Even better, the battery can be recharged by shaking the can. Genius.
(Via)