Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I was reading Ektopia a few days ago and ran across a entry on the Vectrex game system. I remember playing one in the waiting room of my orthodontists back in 1984, many times it was the only reason I’d go to the appointments (that and the cute assistants that he would hire). Years later I found one at a second hand store and bought it in a flash. It was a fantastic game system, the games were fun and looked pretty good even if they were all vector based.
Konami is coming out with a stereoptic viewer adapter named ‘Solid Eye’ for use on your Play Station Portable. From the looks of the translated page it works on the same principal as a classic stereoscope (screen is divided down the center, each side has a slightly different view, and the brain fuses the image into 3D naturally) and works with Metal Gear Acid 2 (coming out in December for apx $50US).
Now I want a PSP so I can display my stereo slides in a cool high tech way.
Konami Introduces 3D PSP Viewer
Translated for your reading pleasure
These books are a wonderful read, cover to cover you will find contraptions and ideas for solving all sorts of problems of every day life.
Many of them may have been practical years ago but are now jaw dropingly weird, but they will still make you knock away the cobwebs in your brain and appreciate the cleverness of these books.
Volume one is available from Project Gutenberg as a free download (its over 500 pages long!) as it’s now out of print but volume three you can buy from Lindsay’s Technical Books (a goldmine of almost forgotten information can be found there!). It would be worth looking for volume one on eBay just because having a nicely bound book is a heck of a lot better than a stack of papers held together with binder clips.
The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics
The Boy Mechanic: Volume 3 from Lindsay Books
Augmented reality and virtual spaces are going to become more and more common simply because the hardware is dropping in price. Nowadays a video projector and good graphics card will only set you back a few hundred bucks and sensor technology is getting real cheap too. The Augmented Coliseum is a fine example of how this technology can enhance a real world application.
The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo has developed Augmented Coliseum, an amazing (just have a look at the video) augmented reality game environment that enables virtual functions for playing a game using small robots and vehicles, superimposing computer graphics onto toys in the real world.
The remote-controlled vehicles scurry around, while status circles and other data are projected on the surface. As the vehicle moves, cameras and photo-detectors relay the movement to tracking software.
Images are projected to the areas corresponding to the actual positions and directions of the toys: virtual laser beams and missiles appear to fly out of the real vehicles; explosions are overlayed on the screen as they connect with their targets.
The mechanical wimsy of Jim Jenkin’s artwork brings joy to my heart. ‘A Dependent’ is my favorite, hard to go wrong with an abstracted mechanical cat. Remember to look at the videos, just seeing the images are not enough.
Not too bad, but only if you don’t want to hack your own camera into a rocket. For my personal taste, 9fps is too slow and jerky for an impressive launch video. It should also have a flip up mirror so right before burn out you get a shot of the horizion. I guess I had better start building my own shouldn’t I…