Back to the Future

These illustrations by Mattias Adolfsson are lovely! Baroque Starwars = awesome.

The Deathstar (now my wallpaper) and Stormtrooper are my favorites.

More here.

Filed under: art, fashion

Soft Hands

I thought I’d post this video of a multitouch music interface. (That you can build for under $50).

It’s related to the previous post, but since I haven’t had time to work on my side project, I can’t show you how…. yet.

Filed under: architecture, art, hobbies, music

Problem, Set, Match

I’m working on a little project that has to do with architecture, but I’m stuck. (Because I’m stupid at math and never took that darn linear algebra course in college.)

So I’m appealling to all my readers who, in fact, are smart. Here’s a math problem for you.

Let’s say I have a ruler and a camera. (which I do) I can take a picture like this:

Fig 1 A

I’ve marked each inch with a little “x”. If we were to look just at the x’s the picture would look like this:

Fig 1 B

Although the ponts are rotated slightly, since the ruler parallel to the base of the camera’s view frustum (ignoring lens distortion), the points are equidistant. If I wanted to figure out what kind of line this was just from these dots, I could easily fit the points to a curve (in this case a straight line) and rotate them straight. To make it look like this:

Fig 2

But what about this case? Where the ruler is in perspective…

Fig 3 A

The dots would look like this:

Fig 3 B

Here the dots are not equidistant. However, I know that this is a straight line and since the distances shrink proportionately each time, I can again redisplay this curve on a plane (again, a straight line) like this (Fig 2):

Fig 2

Now comes the hard part! What if I’ve got a ruler that looks like this?:

Fig 4 A

Dots like this:

Fig 4 B

Can I flatten those to this?:

Fig 5

So the question is: Given a set of points like Fig 4B. Assuming points are equidistant, and the curve lies in a single plane (i.e. isn’t three dimensional) can you transform each of the points into a “flat” plane, where the distance between the points is actually the same?

Some issues:

1.) Since the ruler’s curved, the points are no longer exactly equidistant, but we should assume that they are. (I think, in fact, that the problem is unsolvable if we don’t.)

2.) Without more than one view or camera information, the curve could be reflected. So there are actually two solutions for every input set of points.

3.) This isn’t a 3d to 2d transformation per se, really just a 2d to 2d transformation.

Filed under: architecture, hobbies, personal, programming, projects

Success for Dress

This is a shameless plug for my cousin, Dorothy.

I just noticed that her line of clothes can now be purchased at Jasmine Sola and the Tannery. My friends in Cambridge/all two of my female readers can shop happier.

I am eagerly awaiting a Men’s line.

Filed under: fashion, friends

Phone book

Recently, my cell phone (a Razr) mysteriously broke in half and I was forced to buy a new one. I’ve been tempted by the mobile lifestyle, thanks to some friends (Skitch and Tom P.) who make it look effortless… They also use iPhones. Which, it seems, everybody is buying. (iPhone rules everything around me.)

The iPhone is really really awesome and I’m certainly not immune to its siren song. But, as I shopped around for phones, looking at the google phone and the new blackberry touch carefully, there was something about these iphone clone wars which didn’t quite fit what I was imagining I’d do with it.

It would be Half Kindle/Half iPhone. A thin phone with a easy to read screen that I have to charge every few weeks (if ever).  I wouldn’t care so much if it’s black and white and not color. There’s some concept designs for eink phones out there. But they aren’t thin enough.

Here’s how thin (and flexible) the eink display in Esquire Magazine is. (I dissected an issue a few weeks ago…):

If you can stick a GPS in there I’d be happy. I might use my phone for wayfinding. But not a deal breaker.

No video. Limited harddrive space. Some touch. Multitouch would be nice, but not required. No animations. No web browser although I could still download emails, my feeds, and e-books/pdf (like the kindle) to browse semi-offline. Mostly, it’s just a “phone book”.

I don’t want to be “too connected” or distracted. I think other people feel this way too. I want to be just connected enough to do the reading that I have a hard time doing when my laptop (with wifi)  is in front of me.

Filed under: personal, technology

The Other Side

I’ve been working on more of these Gilgamesh things. I thought before I would print them, I could publish them online somewheres. But it would be nice to have something more artsy (ahem) than a photo gallery.

Luckily, I found this great little AS3 library for making “books” with flex.

Here’s one book I made with my thesis (5mb…wait for it) warts and all!

It’s pretty depressing to see how many mistakes I’ve made… archived forever in MIT’s stacks. Double ugz.

Filed under: art, books, personal, projects, thesis