Friday, September 20, 2013
An improved bubble display with RGB LEDs
hackaday.com: Making a bubble display is quite an undertaking, but [Jay] takes advantage of iterative design to construct this impressive (and at 60 tubes, massive) bubble display. The display functions by dispensing bubbles to serve as illuminated pixels in each tube as they rise through the fluid. His build log steps through the display’s construction with a keen attention to detail and above all, patience.
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11 comments:
Quite impressive and shows me what a little bit of ingenuity can do. I really think what would make this bubble machine work better would be a holographic cad program. Overall the bubble machine is really cool and I wonder how easy it would be to do a similar thing with Arudino. Moving forward, this would be cool as well with a large-scale version. Well almost all things are kool on a larger scale. Does remind me of the water printers that drop water through a special gate that can spell things out. LOVE IT!
First thing, this is awesome because it has to do with BUBBLES! Bubbles are amazing and this is so cool because it's not something you would typically think of, creating images with bubbles. I really like how they used how bubbles rise to the top of a tube to create moving text. It's extremely clever. And then using the LED lights to really make the bubbles pop! (no pun intended) This was fun and innovative. Seeing how using different materials changes the speed of the bubbles. It would be really cool if this could become a bigger thing in advertising. Imagine driving down the highway and you look over at a billboard to find bubbles telling you messages... Now that I have written that out, it's a pretty bad idea and would probably cause a lot of accidents for bubble lovers...
This an interesting display technique. There has been a lot of development in displays recently, of all sorts. There are the computer monitors that went from large tubes to little flat screens on your laptop thanks to liquid crystal display technology. Your television is either an LCD, but it could also be an ultra-thin ulta-efficient, ultra-cool LED display, or maybe a (less than awesome) plasma. Seriously, don't by plasma. But there have also been many advancements in projection technology, like the development of DLP. LED panels have also become a big hit, and CMU now owns one. Although the bubble display isn't the most practical of displays, it is quite the party piece.
While I'd love to put this in my living room (aquarium?), I, unlike many other posters here, am not a fan of what it is in and of itself. I find this to be a relatively inefficient way of displaying anything. That surely doesn't come as a surprise, but there are endless ways to display things on a 2D screen, and this is cool, but not innovative. And definitely not useful for many applications.
Call me a critic, but it's not the new proprietary display screen of the future.
Very interesting video. I think that alternative display methods are really interesting. My best friend had an internship this summer making displays similar to this one. This bubble display has a very simple idea behind it but, as the photos at the end of the video show, can be hard work to get working. I imagine that working with large amounts of liquids on an electronics project was a tricky challenge for the creators of the bubble display. The video didn't get in to the details about what the limitations of the screen are, but I would love to know more about that. The main use I see for this sort of display is as a piece of art in an airport of lobby, but maybe there are other uses that I can't think of as well. I wonder if there are ways of shrinking this type of screen to very very small sizes or enlarging it to giant screens.
I've seen one of these in a hotel lobby! Although the one I saw was not controlled, it just let the bubbles float up randomly. Nonetheless, it was mesmerizing. It's neat to see artists playing with new mediums and coming up with ways to create cool effect with simple materials.
The potential for this technology within the industry is pretty substantial. I can see this technology on a much larger scale being used in professional theatre, and especially theme parks. In a different sort of use, if you had an under the sea attraction at a theme park and were able to incorporate this in a way so the lighted bubbles flowed seamlessly with those in the normal tank, it could be a really beautiful effect. I also wonder if this type of technology has any scrim like capabilities, such as being able to see through the wall with the bubble lights off, but when they turn on it becoming opaque.
Can I just say...EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH LEDS, SO MUCH YES. AND BUBBLES ARE AWESOME! Okay Im done with that. This could become a really cool installation art piece, if this 5' by 5' structure could be made into a full wall, with more complex images. It could be like a video wall, but with bubbles. The wall can develop even further by expanding its range of colors, possibly becoming RGBAW (amber and white). This would also assist with possibly creating images
Whoa...
This is so fun! I have seen things like this before but I never really thought too much about them, especially not about making one. I really love how this combines more "normal" building with more extreme technology. It seems so simple but it has so many different parts. I am curious how they get the light to only light up the bubble and not the entire tube that it is in, although maybe that is just one of those crazy physics things. Also I never thought about how you could use different liquids to achieve different effects. I bet you could do some pretty unique things if you started combining liquids and things of that sort. Also this would be such an amazing wall in a building if you could get it to that big of a scale. It would be especially neat in a gallery or something where you wanted different effects depending on the night.
This is so cool! How can I get one for myself? This is an invention that I feel would be put to good use in the electronic music industry/club scene. It's something that's so captivating and with all of the design and lighting possibilities, you can really make a show out of it. In a way, I find this to be a different form of media and is very appealing to the eye. I could sit and watch this for hours and I feel like that's why it would be so successful. I can't wait to see where this machine goes in the future.
This is really cool looking and I can think of few good uses for it in the theatre world or scenic design. In the past I've seen similar machines that drop streams of water strategically in order to create pictures, words, and patterns, but I had never thought about the possibility of running bubbles through water as a reverse, but similar, solution. I would definitely want to mess around with one of these either for fun or for design.
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