prosthetic knowledge

Minecraft Reality 

iOS Augmented Reality app lets you place Minecraft creations into the real world - video embedded below:

Minecraft Reality lets you combine Minecraft worlds with the real world! Using advanced computer vision, Minecraft Reality maps and tracks the world around you using the camera, and allows you to place Minecraft worlds in reality, and even save them in a specific location for others to look at. You can also upload your own Minecraft worlds at http://minecraftreality.com and place these in reality.

Minecraft Reality lets you:

- View Minecraft worlds tied to reality using advanced computer vision and augmented reality
- Find Minecraft worlds that others have placed in locations nearby
- Upload your own Minecraft worlds at http://minecraftreality.com
- Share screenshots of Minecraft worlds in reality to Facebook and Twitter

Powered by PointCloud SDK (http://pointcloud.io) which lets you map and track 3D spaces using SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping).

More Here

Sketchfab 

Free online service which can display your uploaded 3D files within your browser with WebGL, interactive and embeddable:

Sketchfab is a web service to publish interactive 3D content online in real-time without plugin. The world we live in is in 3D, but the web is still in 2D, and we want to change that. We think your 3D models deserve something better than screenshots or “showreel” videos. That’s why we created Sketchfab. We understand 3D and bring it to the web.

As well as displaying items in a webpage, they are also embeddable - here are a couple of examples below:

You can find out more and try Sketchlab out here

Mixing Digital Sculpture With Real Objects 

Demonstration by Greg Petchkovsky on using current technology creatively, making objects designed on a computer to be placed in the real world. There are a couple more examples of this technique other than the one pictured above:

A sandstone block built from lego, blending real objects with 3d prints from Greg Petchkovsky on Vimeo.

The Sound Of The Earth by Yuri Suzuki 

A globe-like spherical record with grooves arranged as world map, playing music related to geo-political positions:

THE SOUND OF EARTH BY YURI SUZUKI from Alice Masters on Vimeo.

The Sound of the Earth is a content of Yuri Suzuki`s spherical record project, the grooves representing
the outlines of the geographic land mass.  
Each country on the disc is engraved with a different sound, as the needle passes over it plays field
recordings collected by Yuri Suzuki from around the world over the course of four years;
traditional folk music, national anthems, popular music and spoken word broadcasts.

An aural journey around the world in 30 minutes.

You can find out more at Yuri’s website here, which includes a full audio recording of the piece.

Laywood 

New 3D Printing filament allows makers to create objects in wood, created by Kai Parthy - via 3Ders.org:

This wood filament LAYWOO-D3 is a wood/polymer composite - the filament contains recycled wood and harmless binding polymers. The material has similar thermal durability as PLA and can be printed between 175°C and 250°C. “After printing it looks like wood and smells like wood.” Depending on the temperature you can even print wooden-like objects with annual rings. At 180°C, the prints has a light color, at 245°C it becomes darker. Afterwards the printed objects can be cut, grinded or painted.

You can watch a video via the excellent Tumblr blog of roomthily, or find out more at Hack A Day and 3Ders.org

Rotomap 3000 

Arcade-style interactive installation by G8 Labs demonstrates the idea of 3D projection mapping on a moving object - video embedded below:

Rotomap 3000 @ Platine Festival from G8 Labs on Vimeo.

Rotomap 3000 is a funky Visual Music Arcade Game with 3D Projection Mapping.

See it at PLATINE FESTIVAL 2012 in Cologne. platine-cologne.de

Made with vvvv and love by G8 Labs.

Impressive as it is, it isn’t (to my mind) the first documented version of projection on a moving object - Star Night by Daito Manabe managed to so a year ago on a huge hanging cube [link]

Middle Finger Candles by Nao Matsumoto 

A limited edition production made for protesting the use of nuclear energy in Japan on the anniversary of 2011’s tsunami - via Spoon & Tamago

Sometimes art happens by accident. Never has this been more true for Nao Matsumoto who, in late-2011, nearly sliced off his middle finger while cutting wood in his studio. Living in New York, Matsumoto had found himself relying on the middle finger gesture quite frequently. So the accident made him realize the severity of the potential loss – an accident, he says, that would have been equivalent to losing his voice. 

More Here

Beautiful Failures 

Cunicode examines the beauty in errors and accidents of objects created with a 3D printer:

On the path to get the perfect 3D-Print, many meters of filament get piled up as discarded disappointments,
as bastard objects that never were,
as unborn half-things…

… and they are beautiful …

More Here

Printing Reflectance Functions 

Prototype technique to give flat images on paper depth from real light reflection.

Watch the video below for a better illustration of the idea (it’s impressive):

The reflectance function of a scene point captures the appearance of that point as a function of lighting direction. We present an approach to printing the reflectance functions of an object or scene so that its appearance is modified correctly as a function of the lighting conditions when viewing the print. For example, such a .photograph. of a statue printed with our approach appears to cast shadows to the right when the .photograph. is illuminated from the left. Viewing the same print with lighting from the right will cause the statue.s shadows to be cast to the left. Beyond shadows, all effects due to the lighting variation, such as Lambertian shading, specularity, and inter-reflection can be reproduced. We achieve this ability by geometrically and photometrically controlling specular highlights on the surface of the print. For a particular viewpoint, arbitrary reflectance functions can be built up at each pixel by controlling only the specular highlights and avoiding significant diffuse reflections. Our initial binary prototype uses halftoning to approximate continuous grayscale reflectance functions.

More information and links to resources can be found here

Camera to PC Spatial 3D Data Method From Photos 

Project in early stages from Tokyo to quickly digitally reproduce 3D objects from photographs. What differs this to Autodesk 123 Catch is the photographic information is transferred locally to PC over Eye-Fi card as opposed to the cloud. From DigInfo News:

A research group at Tokyo Institute of Technology is developing a system that quickly creates 3D spacial data from photos taken with a digital camera.

“We take pictures using an ordinary digital camera. This camera has an Eye-Fi card, which sends the pictures to a PC wirelessly. This system uses the received pictures to rapidly create a 3D model. A feature of this system is that it doesn’t use any information other than the pictures to construct the 3D data.”

“Other people are researching similar systems. What we’re specializing in is the online aspect. In other words, what’s interesting is, you see the results as soon as you’ve taken the pictures. For example, when aerial photos are processed after saving them, if you need to take more pictures, you have to go out again. But with our system, you can see on the spot whether 3D measurement was successful, so if you don’t have enough pictures, you can just take some more.”

This system uses SfM, or Structure from Motion, which estimates the 3D shape and camera position from several pictures of the same scene. To reproduce spatial position data, it repeatedly identifies and matches characteristic points between two pictures.

More information (including a demonstration video) can be found at DigInfo News here

(PS - DigInfo has been great recently - worth checking regularly)

“Stars on Stones” by Lionel ESTEVE (2009) 

More Here

Work of Daniel Eatock 

Online portfolio consists of photos containing apparently contradictory objects together, which then eventually lead to connections. In his own words:

“I embrace contradictions, and dilemmas. I like gray areas, oxymorons and the feeling of falling backwards”

More can be found at the artist’s website here

Living 90′s Graphism by Maxime Guyon 

Photography project takes a particular style of mid 80’s / 90’s graphic design and recreates it with real-world objects.

More examples can be found at wanderingbears here

Maxime Guyon’s Tumblr can be found here

The Art Of Ken Knowlton

Artist who was working with alternative pixels and text art before it was fashionable. I’ve covered Ken Knowlton many times previously, but thanks to the Tumblr text-mode for, err, re-reminding me …

He has been making these images with various objects for years (from dominoes, sea shells to toy cars), with the examples above ranging from 1966 to 2003. Here, in his own words, is an explanation of his background, taken from a short piece “Mosaic Portraits: New Methods and Strategies”:

My main interest was computers, particularly their use in picture-making … The non-scientific, some say artistic, aspects of computer graphics arose for me via a sophomoric prank. Ed David, two levels up, was away for a while and the mice, one might say, played ever more freely. Leon Harmon stopped by to ask me for help with a brilliant idea: when Ed returns, one entire wall of his office will
be covered with a huge picture made of small electronic symbols for transistors, resistors and such. But overall, they will form a somewhat-hard-to-see picture of, guess what, a nude! And so the renowned Harmon-Knowlton nude was conceived, coaxed into being, and duly hung on Ed’s wall.

But the big version burst forth a while later at a press conference on Art and Technology in Robert Rauschenberg’s loft, and on the watershed date of October 11, 1967, it appeared atop the first page of the second section of the New York Times, which made not the slightest effort to conceal its birthplace. Billy Kluver claims that this was the first time ever that the Times printed a nude! The PR department huddled and decided, so it seems, that since she had appeared in the venerable Times, our nude was not frivolous inyour-
face pornography after all, but in-your-face Art. Their revised statement was: You may indeed distribute and display it, but be sure that you let people know that it was produced at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
We did make similar pictures - of a gargoyle, of seagulls, of people sitting at computers - which have appeared here and there. But it was our Nude who would dolphin again and again into public view in dozens of books and magazines. Sometimes it is excused by a more dignified title, like Studies in Perception I; once the two of us were photographed in front of it, providing a scant two-piece cloak of modesty. Just recently I encountered it in Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine (1970) where, as last in a three-panel display, it demonstrates progress (or regress) in mechanization of the portrayal of woman.
That was the beginning for me of a fascination with large pictures made of small things, that has occupied my eyes, hands and mind ever since. It was also my first conscious buffeting by chaos: a mischievous butterfly had flapped, and a huge chunk of my career and persona veered onto a new course.

On the other hand, and again by chance, my debut as artist was postponed for several years. How so?
Because Art-and-Technology was the rage, and The Museum of Modern Art had a “Machine Show,” and the Brooklyn Museum and other places had similar parties, and in each case Leon and I submitted the Nude to demonstrate a collaboration between artist and techno-geek (or whatever). One of us had to be an artist. So
by the whim of a spin-launched coin, Leon became the artist and I remained a technologist (pretense aside, so did he). I did not understand until ten years later that I had lost the toss, since artists, I was learning, were the perceptive predictors, the daring, flamboyant and revered analysts of past, present and future, the grand but sly commentators on human joy and sorrow. (After another ten years, and exposure to a hundred artists, I learned that that notion was 90 percent humbug.)

Interesting to read how “… Art-and-Technology was the rage …”

You can read the rest of the essay here, and see more examples of Ken’s mosaic pixel work here