James Brown

@ancient.bsky.social

1217 Followers 194 Following

A small plastic cylinder with a picture of a flower glowing on the front of it. It has prominent scanlines, but looks pretty decent all things considered.
Extreme closeup of a mechanical TV playing rickroll. A ruler in the foreground shows the screen to be about 7mm across. It's low resolution, but recognisable.
A teeny nipkow drum based mechanical display spins up and locks on to an image with a satisfying bounce. It shows test card F. That's basically it.
recognisably Doom, but in a flickery cylinder; blurry, low resolution, messed up scanlines. The camera moves around, and if you squint you can sort of tell that there's parallax going on.
A closeup of debug text on a monitor: “panel: 39 microseconds; 25166 frames per second”
I'm attaching a diffuser panel to a contraption consisting of multiple low resolution led panels in an octagonal prism layout. The image behind it is blurry, but is unmistakaby Rick Astley in his widely celebrated music video.
A blurry low framerate video of a 3D printed cylindrical lightfield display, showing a spinning spotty cube in flickery low res. The camera moves about to demonstrate horizontal and vertical parallax.
Very low res greyscale image showing a collection of parts (projector, screwdrivers etc) and my hands as seen by my 90s eyes.
A short video showing a multiview stereo projection setup. Several mirrors direct multiple views of the ghost Slimer into a column of fog. My hand waves around in it to show that's something I can do.
A spinning contraption displaying a very glitchy very low res cube. The camera moves around frantically to impart some sense of parallax, giving a sense that it’s fully 3D.
A view from a hilltop in the morning sun; blue sky above, a layer of clouds below, mountains on the horizon. Another hill pokes through the clouds in the foreground. Wellington harbour patchily visible underneath.
A closeup of a mirror element in my hand, consisting of a 4 by 2 grid of not quite square mirrors about 20mm across arranged at various angles.
Rick Astley projected onto a little fog wall.
3D Princess Leia projected into a mist volume. POV shot, and my hand reaches out and grabs at the image, fruitlessly.
A clip of another janky 3D display device. In the foreground, a ghostly blue toroid rotates in a flickering cloud in midair. In the background, various views of it are reflected and repeated in some dimly lit optical setup. The camera rotates around it in an attempt to demonstrate parallax.
A screenshot of a guardian article which Bluesky flagged as adult content. The article is about the generation gap, and is illustrated with a picture of a young woman / old man combination that looks startlingly like a bell end.
A lego space minifig in the foreground, flashing lights in the background. The lights are playing Doom in their bokeh.
Closeup of my hand holding a small circuit board. It’s black and round, with a square hole in the middle (the PCB I mean). There are some buttons around the edge, a USB connector, and a little Pi microcontroller.
A diagram from the datasheet of a small display module. It is absolutely infested with little arrows pointing at different places on the display, labelled either "Do" or "Don't". No more context is provided.
screenshot from youtube studio: "A/B test report. They all performed well."
A volumetric display in a glass block. A hand places a (Rubik's) cube in front of it, and an image of it appears in low resolution in the display. It looks pretty flat, which is sad, because in real life it looks very 3D.
A Raspberry Pi Zero with a little camera attached, mounted in a small 3D printed tray, and looking out a hole in the front face.
A short video clip of a very low res pixellated game, played in a volumetric glass cube. It's a slice of something approximating Zarch on the Archimedes, arranged more like a side scrolling shooter to fit in the available volume.
A short looping video of a parallax sweep past a glass block with a low resolution pointcloud of Tutankhamun's funerary mask shining inside it. As the camera moves, the golden points twinkle and reflect in the crystal.
A looping animation of a glass block full of dots, sitting on a checkered background. The points are scattered all over with no discernable pattern, but once per loop they all come into alignment and form a regular hex grid.
A picture of a Koi rendered in smooth little splats, floating in a black unixey sort of window.
A short clip of a volumetric display using a glass block laser etched with 32000 points as a projection target. There's a pointilist koi carp hanging inside the block. The camera moves, providing some parallax to demonstrate the depth.
A frankly undecipherable photo featuring neon colours, red lines and dots, and some blue arcs. There's a sense of 3D, and maybe a wireframe aesthetic? It might just as well be abstract.
A closeup of a glass cube with a moving eyeball floating inside it. You can kind of make out that the glass cube has the moon etched inside it, and the eyeball is projected on that.
A photograph of the end of two lengths of aluminium extrusion. The one on the left is labelled “Aluminum”, the one on the right “Aluminium”. The one on the left is 1 inch by 1 inch. The one on the right is 20 millimetres by 20 millimetres.
A tiny circuit board filled with an RP2040 microcontroller, connected to a tiny LCD showing a colour image at a quite reasonable resolution. The image is Doom.
A home made Lego slope brick nestled in my fingers. It's resin printed in a sort of pinkish beige that looks like pale skin. On the studs it says "JIMBO" in the Lego logo typeface.
A picture of the inside of an artificial person's head. The Weyland Yutani logo is embossed at the base of its skull.
A picture of an animatronic head with its face removed. It’s wearing a hat, and its ears and the back of its head are fine, but the face is now just a big ball of mouths.
A video of a doll's head with a cutout for its mouth, revealing a spinning ball of mouth shapes. It switches between them to approximate beatboxing in time with the music.
A crudely MS Painted image of the young Tim Aidley saying "hello. I'm Tim"
A short clip of a Dremel cutoff disk being applied to a steel rod, creating a shower of sparks.
A plastic doll's head - a jowly little gentleman in a bowler hat. The mouth switches rapidly between different lip shapes in sync with the audio behind a sharp cutout in the face, and the eyebrows shift slightly from time to time.
A screenshot of two comments in a row on one of my youtube videos, both from the same user, both saying the same thing: "Well, someone has too much time on their hands, don't they!"
A hard plastic doll's head on a cluttered desk. The mouth is clearly a separate element, and the eyebrows look a bit fishy, but the overall impression is of a clean and keen perky little fellow.
A sphere of mouths. It's like an IBM Selectric golfball, but with mouths instead of letters. When it's running it spins and tilts quickly enough that different mouth shapes are presented like a flipbook, lip syncing to the audio. In the background, a Kit Cat Clock ticks away, its pendulum and eyes appearing to slow to a crawl when the video enters a slow motion segment. In slow motion, the mouth ball moves slowly enough to see the transitions, and wobbles and rings as it moves.
A closeup of a terminal animating emoji to approximate the appropriate visemes for the associated audio.
An image from the 1980s Lego Ideas Book showing a mechanical sequencer programmed punch-card style with Lego rack pieces.
The split car from Malcolm
A 3D printed black plastic bracket, made up of simple curves and angles.
A closeup of a Lego slope brick with an embedded oled, running a display with a scrolling text console on one side, and a rotating something or other next to it.
A bulbous resin printed object, with the quad topology clearly visible on its surface.
A comet visible in the dusk sky, close to a hilly horizon
A photo of a street corner from GTA 3 rendered in low resolution volumetric 3D on a swept volume display. It's recognisable as a street corner, certainly.
A video of the Lander demo from the Acorn Archimedes, running in full volumetric 3D in my home made orb.
a piece of black foamcore with a 3D printed adapter mounting it to the lens hood attachment of a DSLR.
A video of a swept volume display showing a voxelised fish swimming around a voxelised column of seaweed. The camera swoops up and around to show off just how 3D it all is.
Camera menu offering “for NTSC” and “for PAL”