Category: Cool

Cardboard Robot Halloween Costume of Doom

Robot costume

In 2004 I ended up having some time on my hands about three days before a big Halloween party. I did what anyone would do, I built robot costume out of cardboard boxes and dryer hose.

Sorry the photos aren’t better, for some weird reason I had set my camera on super low file size. I wish I had taken more shots of the build but I was trying to meet a deadline.

Robot costume - arms The whole thing was bonded together with tape (clear packing and gaffers), hot glue, and lots of brass paper brads. I used dryer hose for the arms and as it had to fit up to my shoulders I clipped the wires in them for about eight inches on the inside at the tops and covered them with some gaffers tape so I wouldn’t get poked. I tied them together with two short sections of rope,one across my chest and the other on my back. This kept the sleeves from coming off and falling to my wrists. I added some cardboard cuffs to hide the claw interface.

Robot costume - grippers getting some paint The claws were made from heavy tag board and regular corrugated cardboard. I wore them like mittens and my fingers ran through some cardboard loops on the inside so I could operate them. The hinges were paper brads.
I wanted rivets on my robot so I used about two boxes of brads all over the thing. They worked real well as surface detail and as actual mechanical reinforcements. I ran tape on the backside to avoid the sharp ends.
The name badge was simply an old LED chaser badge that I had built in the late 80’s. I mounted it to the costume with hot glue. I added some details like the chest logo and the static bag eyes after I slathered on a few coats of this water based gray paint I found at Home Depot.

Robot costume - the costume at rest

The costume was a success, after the party I went trick or treating with my kids and I can’t tell you how many comments I got from kids and parents alike. 

For more photos of my costume, got have a look at the photos on Flickr.

 

Running low on ideas for Halloween costumes this year? Costume Super Center is the place to go for your costume ideas and supplies. If you’re looking of kids costumes and can’t find what you need at the store, order them online. If you’re looking for a costume for a college or office party, we’ve got a great supply of adult costumes as well!

ifusion Stereo PMP Display

iFusion

In the ever popular search for cool gear for your gear I saw this. It says that by sticking this special screen over your personal media player and bam! You get eye popping 3d media. Well… Hold on there. i know a little bit about autostereo displays. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and make a guess how this works. First you are going to need some content in 3D. Left and right images or clips of video taken with a 3d camera. That’s a no brainer. Second, the content will have to go through a special media player that will either interlace the left and right feeds on the fly or will play back stuff that you have converted on your PC. It more than likely has more horsepower than a PMP. What you will get when you look at the PMP with out the special screen will be a sliced up picture that has striped of content side by side.  Maybe a few pixels wide. The screen is a lenticular lens array that will shift the slices of image to it’s respective eye. A good example of all this is an article on DIY lenticular prints that I wrote up a few days ago. I’ve seen professional systems that have these, nice 36" LCD screens, and the images look pretty good. Or it will use a red/green color image anaglyph. Those look ok in my opinion. I’ve never seen a color anaglyph that looks 100 percent real. I’m hoping for a true stereo image but you can never tell.

I’m looking forward to seeing one of these sceens in place one day. I have a crap load of stereo images and I’d love to show them to people from my PDA.

[via ubergizmo]

ifusion

I Remember Night Flight

Night Flight 

How many of us remember the many nights spent scanning the broadcast wasteland in search of this oasis of entertainment? Night Flight to me was an introduction to avaunt guard film, new and fantastic types of music and videos, and the timeless Church of the Sub Genius. More than 20 years has passed but the memories have not faded. Wikipedia has a fantastic write up on the shows, it’s hard for me to call them a series. It was too free form for that. There is little chance that the shows will ever be released commercially, the copyrights issues would make them the most expensive DVDs ever produced. However, that’s not to say that you can’t find private collectors that might have a DVD or two lying about.

RED Digital Cinema

RED digital camera systemA friend in the video business told me about this camera system. First thing you have to remember is that many professional video cameras are much like professional or prosumer still cameras. You can change the lenses and sometimes the part the hold the film. With a video camera you can swap lenses and many times the part the records the video that your shooting. It’s a handy feature when your client asks for everything to be shot on DigiBeta and not DVPro.

The Red Digital Cinema system takes this modular design to an extreme. Built around a core image sensor unit, the Red system uses an amazingly huge sensor to capture the scene. Weighing in at 12 mega pixels, the Mysterium CMOS sensor is 24.4 x 13.7mm in size. This baby will have no issues with loss of detail or depth of field issues that plague cameras with smaller sensors. Each frame is captured at 4520 X 2540, 1-120 fps, progressive HDTV format (4.5k (2540P), 4k, 2k, 1080P, 720P or 480P) in a 4:4:4 color space. Yeah, that’s bigger than what my Nikon D70 (3006×2000) captures! There is a sample image here if you want to see just how crisp the picture is. To put the image size and quality into a little perspective for you think of those little 110 format cameras that were popular in the ’70. The negative was about the size of your thumb nail. That’s what a standard DV camera will capture. Now the Red system would have to be a medium format negative, like the kind that’s popular with professional photographers. Many many times larger. You can see a good example here.

So you have a knock out image capture system but what about the other parts of the camera? Ahh, now there is another chunk of high tech coolness. It’s all built on a modular system called the Red-Rail. Bolt on whatever parts you need for the job. Shooting ENG, bolt the hand grips and shoulder pad to it. Studio shooting, tripod mount and a larger external LCD display. You get the idea.

The camera has FireWire 800/400, USB-2 and e-SATA interfaces so output isn’t an issue at all. Heck, it will even use up to a 128GB flash drive. Once you footage is on the drives you can pretty much do with it whatever you want. The workflow options will cover just about everything you might ever need to shoot. Shoot, process, correct, re-size, encode, edit.

I can’t wait to see video shot with this system. At a price of $17,500US it might sound too expensive but that’s very reasonable for professional video gear.  

Full tech specs here. 

RED Digital Cinema