Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..
Designing gears is often a matter of knowing what needs to be done, but having trouble imagining into existence the perfect set of gears for the job. The above video does a great job of showing how a simple concept was refined into the elegance of design that is the modern differential gear that allows a single drive to rotate multiple wheels on a vehicle at optimal speeds to prevent slipping.
Liquid plastic casting resins tend to be expensive and have set properties that limit your flexibility. Â Mikey77 has come up with his own material out of materials so common, chances are you already have them. Best of all, you choose the color, viscosity, and set time yourself based on your needs.
He calls the stuff Oogoo, a name reminiscent of Sugru, an off the shelf product with very similar properties. In a nutshell, his recipe is very simple, just mix corn starch with silicone caulk.
The problem with silicone is that it takes a long time to dry from the outside in, the corn starch allows it to dry from the inside out, and very quickly. The ingredients are pretty safe and stable, so you can mix in your own dyes and other ingredients. Check out his full instructable here.
If you are anything like me, math class was only good for one thing: Quieting down that analytical part of the brain long enough to get in some good doodling, which is why, in order to pass a math class, I had to stop bringing paper and just hope I could absorb something from the lecture before passing out from boredom. Now I find I just had the wrong teacher. If Vi Hart were my teacher, I think I would have learned at lightning speed. Check out the videos above for a sample.
Here’s another:
If you like the concept of learning math, but don’t relish the slogging through textbooks, I highly recommend her site. I actually learned some very helpful things in most of the videos I’ve watched so far, and I enjoyed it. http://vihart.com/
Tilt shifting in photography is when you deliberately put your lens out of line with the sensor in such a way that it changes the focus on the sensor/film rather than just based on distance of objects and depth of field. The resulting photos and videos trick the eye into thinking it is seeing a tiny scale model rather than something miles away. A similar effect can be created through video/image editing. In the above pictures, artcyclopedia has added an effect similar to tilt shift via software to several of Van Gogh’s works (click the picture to see their full gallery and the originals). I love the effect.
I think the kind of visual cues we take from tilt shifted photography are to some extent a product of the photographic age. We are used to seeing two dimensional representations of three dimensional space as seen through the single eye of a camera. When you look at a real scene through two eyes, whatever you are looking at is in focus, while anything out of focus is blurry and doubled (and by definition, not what you are currently looking at). One of the flaws with the current round of 3D movies is that while things have depth cues based on sending a different signal to each eye, there is no adjustable depth of field based on what you are looking at. The focus of any given object is chosen by the camera, rather than the viewer, and the whole image is the same distance away, even if each eye sees a different angle.
I did a little experimenting on my own to get a better understanding of things. I think the choice of impressionism is a good one. Impressionists have a tendency to capture the soul of a thing crisply, but without much detail. This means that when you blur a background, it looks believable rather than smeared. Creating this effect in Photoshop can be pretty simple.
Part of what makes tilt shift photography make things look miniature is the difference distance makes to depth of field. In tilt shift, focus is much more independent of distance. In a large scale photo, once you are focused a ways out, it tends to focus to infinity. Painters tend to make their paintings fully focused at all distances, which improves clarity, but degrades the feeling of depth. With a tilt shift effect I wanted to choose a subject in the composition, bring the eye to them, and then create the illusion of depth in the rest of the image by virtue of knowing where the eye is already looking. This is counter to one of the usual goals of composition: To keep the eye moving. Below is a Monet I found with a quick image search that served my needs nicely for a very simplified test.
The alterations I made can be seen below. I don’t think it made the image nicer, but I think it accomplished my compositional goal of directing the eye and holding it on the subject.
I chose it because it covers a vast distance, contains a subject to draw the eye, and has a tree that exists within the plane of focus, but in front of an area that I planned to blur. The  clarity of the tree is what makes the end result different from what you would see with a tilt shift lens. This only took a few minutes. Below are the steps I took. If you have a copy of Photoshop, give it a shot. It’s a good skill to have in your repertoire.
I’m sure you can find a more long winded tutorial somewhere, but if you have a moderate knowledge of Photoshop, this should suffice as a bare bones process to get you started.
If you are the computer geek of the family, you’ll appreciate the above clip. The disconnect between technophobes and technophiles isn’t a recent occurrence, but lately it is becoming less about class and more about interest and aptitude. Computers are constantly conquering previously analog realms, from calculations, to games, to news to photography, to shopping, dating and socializing, it is getting hard to be a member of society without a certain amount of proficiency. Those who are only now finding something that engages them on the computer are having a tough time of it. A small group of them take to it like a duck to water, but the rest often find themselves utterly lost in a set of conventions that, while sensible and simple, are completely alien. The video above seems at first glance to be a ridiculous spoof, but it’s a little scary just how close it comes to the truth.
This is a way to make three dimensional holograms without lasers or special equipment. It uses stuff you already own, and the results are astounding. Bill Beaty shows us some examples in the video above. Here is a great page with pictures about how he stumbled upon the phenomenon one day out on a walk and pioneered the technique, and another page with detailed instructions. The technique relies upon the effect you see in very fine circular scratches on a shiny material (like car paint), where the reflection appears to form a straight line. By varying the location of the circles, you set the locations of the lines, and by varying their diameter, you vary their apparent depth.
Update: Reader Lali has noted that the above links aren’t working, so I’ll post a summary of the process: