El mundo analógico y digital combinados en un sorprendente espejo de madera:
The wooden mirror has 830 pieces of wood each about 40 mm square arranged into an octagon of 35 x 29 . Each piece of wood is connected to a servo motor that can tilt it about 30º up and down. The whole piece is lit from above with a few spot lights, in a way that when the pieces are tilted upwards they become brighter, and when they tilt downwards they become darker. The servo motors can position each piece in 255 positions theoretically yielding 255 gray levels per piece. However there are perhaps just 10 levels of gray distinguishable enough in this range. Each 8 servo motors are connected to a serial servo controller which is a small circuit that takes serial commands and controls the motors. There are 108 such controllers in the mirror. Each 11 controllers share a serial communication line to the computer. There are 10 serial communication lines going to the computer, the two built in ports plus 8 more on an add-on board. Also connected to the controllers are 4 power supplies supplying 100 amps of electricity for the motors. In the center of the Mirror a tiny video camera is concealed. It sends the viewer’s picture to the computer via the AV port. The software on the computer (Macintosh 8600 AV ) is a combination of custom software written in C and Macromedia Director. The software digitizes the video and reduces its size to 35 X 29 pixels . It then converts the color information into gray levels and adjusts the brightness of each pixel to compensate for the various shades of the wood pieces. The software then compares the state of the wooden mirror to the required image and sends commands to the mirror to change the position of only those pieces that need to be moved. This reduces the amount of information that needs to be sent and allows the mirror to refresh itself about 15 times per second, resulting in smooth motion. All phases of design fabrication and programming were done by Daniel Rozin. All the construction of this piece was done by hand including all the mechanical connections and wiring. It took 10 months to build the mirror.
(vía BoingBoing)
[Estoy escuchando: «Iberia Suite (orchestrated by Arbos from ‘Iberia’ for piano): La Fête-Dieu à Séville (El Corpus de Sevilla)» de Guzman, Enrique Pérez De en el disco Albeniz: Concierto Fantastico/Iberia]
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