Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Oh look! More cell phone camera mods! For around $36US you can buy a set of four special effect auxiliary lenses for your phones camera. With a total of 14 different lenses to choose from your assured of an interesting effect for any occation.
[via Picturephoning]
About a year ago I saw a fisheye lens that was built like this. I’d like a set of these, the camera in my Motorola V300 absolutely sucks and needs all the help it can get.
Instead of screwing them onto your lens, there is a magnet built-in and they will stick on to the lens (I’m having some doubt here). They don’t seem to be a joke at all: the telephoto lens offers up to 2X zoom power, the macro lens offers up to 4X zoom and the wide angle lens allow you to zoom out 0.5X. Each comes with a cellphone strap, when you are done using it, they turn into a charm!
I saw this tacked on the end of a Rocketboom episode a while back and thought it was a clever project. Students at MIT have built a paint brush that uses sampled video as its paint bucket.
I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special “ink” they just picked up from their immediate environment.
Dow does it work?
In our current prototype, the brush houses a small CCD video camera in its tip with a ring of white LEDs around it. Force sensors are also embedded inside of the brush, measuring the pressure that is getting applied to the bristles. When the brush touches a surface, the lights around the camera briefly turn on to provide supplemental light for the camera. During that time, the system grabs the frames from the camera and stores them in the program.
I like it and so did the judges at the competition. It won a gold award.
Greg sent this to me:
The Dunn has two high-order adaptive optics benches, the only telescope in the world with two systems, which enhances instrument setup and operations.
This image was built from a series of 80 images, each 1/100th of a second long (10 ms), taken over a period of 3 seconds by a high-resolution Dalsa 4M30 CCD camera in its first observing run after being added to the Dunn. Speckle imaging reconstruction then compiles the 80 images and greatly reduces residual seeing aberrations.
I wonder if any digital camera makers will ever offer adaptive optics on their products. It may not be practical to do the layering of images if your subject is moving, but it might be useful to chart out the lens flaws and build a digital filter to correct them in camera.
Lovely, looks like if you have a camera (still or video) that uses a Sony CCD it my be susceptible to moisture leaking into the sensor and messing up the images.
Konica Minolta, Canon, Nikon Fujifilm, also issue CCD alerts
Very clever project. He built himself a pinhole camera out of LEGO bricks. It uses 120 roll film and sports a film counter! I might use that in my next pinhole camera myself…
[via Boing Boing and Ektopia]
HOWTO Build a pinhole camera from legos
Gallery of images taken with the camera