prosthetic knowledge

All Lovely Stuff - DRAWING MACHINE 

London design brand creates cheap creative drawing machine with simple materials - video demonstration below:

A do-it-yourself way to make art! An oak cotton reel, peg, felt tip pen, rubber band and a small bit of wax is all that’s required to create this drawing machine that will inspire the Picasso in anyone. All materials are included in this self-assembly kit.

Obviously too late for Christmas, but more info to buy one can be found here

Kaleidocycle 

Minico have put up some instructions to create your own paper folding toy.

More Here

[note: gif is not my own]

Animated GIF in 3D 

Webtoy plays any animated GIF in 3D space in your browser, playing each frame spatially and sequentially from each other. You can use the mouse to move around and change the perspective of the animation.

The first animation above is an example used within the project. Using a GIF made from many images of a human body cross-section, the animation displayed is created from the sequence of the images - it is not a 3D model in itself, more a stack of animated frames next to each other.

You can use any GIF you have on your desktop - not all GIFs will be successful, but I tried out one of Max Capacity’s pieces which works well with the pixellated image - the effect is not too far off like a lenticular postcard.

Put together by thespite, you can try it out here

Transformer Boom Box Hack 

Turning a Transformer toy that turns into cassette player, modded with real speakers - via Instructables:

Ever since I first watched the transformers movie, Blaster has been one of my favorite transformers.  Two years ago, I finally got a Blaster toy for Christmas (It was the remake, with Lockjaw, Eject, and Ramhorn), As soon  as I pulled him out of the twisty ties, I knew he would be the perfect transformer for some sort of modification; He had nice, large, hollow legs, plenty of space in his chest, and even a molded on/off switch on one of his legs. Upon further study, I found that the blaster mold was originally intended to be an actual radio, with a special cassette that acted as a receiver.  After learning this, I was inspired to recreate this toy, replacing the radio cassette with an earphone jack that can be plugged into almost any MP3 player.

More Here

Silk 

Two highly-polished generative drawing web toys by Yuri Vishnevsky.

New Silk is symmetrical drawing - simple, yet the results are satisfying.

Silk turns your input into a beautiful flow that travels to the side.

More about the work can be found here - scroll down and you will see info and a link to an iOS app of this project.

Art of Kong Byung Hoon (공병훈)

Artist creates series of oil paintings of various cartoon character figurines (both Eastern and Western) which re-enact scenes from classic fine art.

Google Translated Artist Statement:

I am a masterpiece of classical art of four trillion figures by incorporating a comic book character will work. This classic image of each character and the story of the conflict is in order to screen the configuration of the elements of the classics, and several characters in comics Figures consist of this noble and solemn, based on the classic story of the story deals with the light of modern common.

  Cartoon movies we see mainly the configuration of each character’s personality is made by the story, but the character’s history, spatiality and time when the province changed the nature can not evolve any yiyagideun I will use these points. For example, in one of my work with American cartoon characters from Disney’s Tinker Bell Smurfs, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse cartoon Sonic and Crayon Japan, South Korea Pororo cartoon, game Angry Bird character and appearance of the character will range from the contents of a classic encounter. I ‘peuraedeurik Jameson’ means, according to neutral or critical pungjana motives and goals of their own, without any historical nonsense by a desire to work, so my work belongs to the pastiche.

  A canvas of classic and contemporary stories in the stories are different, each very different from each other, the subject of the story and characters, even the markedly different backgrounds can see that, so any story by story of the conflict can not be completed, original meaning is lost. one side of the story when you try to deploy the other side the same way that the story is interrupted, or when one of these two stories at the same time, not just as concentrated. Thus in the works increases, the story becomes more and more incomprehensible. a story that clearly will not be able to deploy. personality is too strong to bring up stories to one story every single one you can not deploy properly, or from where, do not know what the story was going to while everything is meaningless, ie the inner personality of each character is that the lack of.

More at the GAGA Gallery here (Korean)

Nintendo Chiritorie (無線クリーナー チリトリー) 

A remote-controlled vacuum cleaner made by Nintendo, released in 1979. From the blog Before Mario:

Chiritorie is a remote controlled, battery operated mini vacuum cleaner. It measures a mere 16 centimeters across, with a small fan providing dust-sucking action. Although it can actually vacuum, this is not intended for serious cleaning. It would take you all day to do a single room. 

Chiritorie was released in 1979, and retailed for ¥5,800. It did not become a big seller and was produced in relatively small numbers, making it one of the rarer Nintendo toys and very difficult to find these days.

Embedded below is a video of the machine in action:

More information and images can be found at Before Mario here

Omnibot BattroBorg 20

Newly-announced from Japan is miniature boxing robots controlled with Wii-like motion controllers … I can see this as a potential must-have Christmas craze toy or some type of drinking game challenge …

You can see the (Japanese) Flash animation promoting it here, or read the English Press Release here

Custom Fisher-Price Toy Records 

Instructibles guide to make your own toy records, here demonstrated with “Stairway To Heaven”:

From Fred27:

I recently stumbled across and old toy record player made by Fisher Price in the 1970s. I’m sure many of you will recognise this iconic toy … As with many 40-year old toys, it was in a bit of a sad state and a couple of the records had been lost. Technology has moved on since it was manufactured and making some new records for it seemed like a nice way to merge old technology and new.

3D printing a record might seem like the obvious choice these days, but I decided to go with CNC milling.

Why a mill you ask? Not a laser cutter or a 3D printer? Well we can’t use a laser cutter as the record needs slots in the surface but these don’t go all the way through. Laser cutters are great if you don’t need any partial depth cuts, but we do. 3D printing the record would seem to be a sensible choice and would definitely do the job. However, we will end up creating plastic pins around 1mm in size that trigger the music box hidden in the record player’s arm. I was worried about whether the extruded plastic technique used by most printers would give it the required strength. 

Fred27 also put together a piece of code to help edit the music for one of these disks.

You can read the whole How-To here

Online Spot Art Generator

Part of a collection of online generative art composition toys created by Rob Myers using Processing.js.

Go here and just click the image for another automated composition. You can also play around with stripes, colour grids and blank canvasses. All have links to their respective source codes.

Circuli 

Online generative ambient sound generator:

Circuli is a generative musical instrument conceptualized and developed by Batuhan Bozkurt.

• Circles grow at a constant rate.
• No two circle can overlap.
• Bigger circle pushes and shrinks smaller circle when in contact.
• A circle “pops” and makes a sound when its boundary intersects with the center of another circle.
• The pitch of the sound is determined by the position of the circle on the background. Bigger the hole, higher the pitch.
• The envelope of the produced sound is determined by a number of parameters including final circle size and time of interaction between two involved circles.

Here is a video of it in action (which is also an iOS app):

You can play around with this sound toy here, as well as find links to the App Store