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Does anyone know how possible it is to have animated skins on 3d objects, generated from within the object itself. (As I write this, the thought that immediately comes to mind is, Well duh, sounds like a tv set.) What I'm thinking about is, for example, a guitar that is capable of generating animated images on its surface as it's being played. Has anybody heard of this, or know whether its technologically practical?
Posts: 867 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Well, there are things like flexible OLED displays. They have longevity problems, and the flexible things aren't too durable, but it might work for what you have in mind.
Posts: 145 | Registered: Apr 2007
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Thanks guys, it's just an idea that occurred to me while I was talking to one of my design students. Just wondering. I would guess that it would be super expensive. The display wouldn't need to be flexible but would need to be incorporated into the body of the object it was applied to.
Posts: 867 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Ummm... besides expensive light-emitting materials, has your student thought about using projection? It might not give the effect you want, but it's cheap and might work well with stationary/slowly moving objects.
Posts: 353 | Registered: Sep 2003
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No problemo. Just use a DigitalLightProjection system in a hollow-bodied guitar with a translucent surface.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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That's why you do external projection. (ie. Coat the guitar with reflective paint, Shine a projector on it from 30 feet away - heck, shine 4 projectors on it if you want all four sides.)
There are obvious shadow issues if anything (including a performer) is inbetween the projector and the guitar, but if there's nothing inbetween, it can be quite effective. Also, if the guitar is moving in an irregular way, track it with an IR cam (or something like it) and have your projector hooked to software that draws the overlay from the tracking data.
If this all sounds too crazy, check out what's been done here with a (somewhat) similar setup and a little language called Processing.
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In a solid body guitar, you could just have the top be an LCD or have it studded with LEDs. Depending on what kinds of graphics you want, this could be done pretty cheaply.
Posts: 145 | Registered: Apr 2007
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Yep, an LCD screen could easily be embedded into a guitar's face. Then a plexiglass shield over it to lessen the possibility of breakage during play. Problem being it would be rectangular, wouldn't cover the entire face.
The LEDs alone would be ridiculously expensive for anything approaching a decent display resolution. 50X50 resolution would reqire 2500LEDs times 4 -- three primary colors, and one color (I think red) requires two LEDs to match the brightness of one LED of the other colors -- for 10,000LEDs. And ya don't even wanna think about the headache of wiring those suckers to a controller.
Clear acrylic solid-body guitars have been around for nearly as long as electrics. Since the direction of light's travel bends each time it passes through the surface between two materials in accordance to Fermat'sLeastTimePrinciple, and the light will be traveling through such surface(s) -- air-to-solid (and solid-to-air) -- the surface of the hollow containing the DLP will have to be precision ground into a rather sophisticated curve to bend the light to go where it should on the guitar face. And the DLP will have to precisely placed within that cavity. Neither impossible nor absurdly expensive, but a difficult enough engineering challenge. ie Not a "let's just cobble this together" project; but something that could be done by a dedicated amateur astronomer who grinds his own lenses&mirrors. The more distortion one is willing to accept on the display surface, the easier it will be to do.
A 50inch-diagonal DLP television has a depth of 6&7/8ths inches. Proportionally, a 20inch-diagonal guitar face should should need a depth of 2&3/4ths inches. The frame of the hollow-body should be strong enought to allow nearly any material to be draped/stretched across a face. The limiting factor will be the desirability of the resonances produced: which is a matter of "taste", of ear; which can be extensively modified through electronic-processing in an amplified system. Not sure, but I'd suspect that the material used for DLP screens is tightly stretched across the tv frame. I'd try stretching&gluing the DLPscreen material onto quarter-inch plexiglass beforehand, then place the shaped&joined material into the front edge of the frame with the plexiglass as the outside surface. Definitely want LEDs or laser diodes as the light source. With fan. Otherwise the DLP display would run way too hot.
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