O n e   c r a z y   m u l t i   t a l e n t

This creation and idea emerged as a result after watching numerous science fiction movies in the past. One of the typical interresting things in sciene fiction movies are often the interior, gadgets and new ways of thinking and a predictable design for the future.

One of the cool ideas is the digital wall painting where supposedly a standard painting is hanging on the wall and showing changing pictures instead of a still one. We have also seen small bedtable photographs in frames doing the same in a couple of sci-fi movies.

Anyway, this idea have always been on my mind for several years and now I wanted to test it out myself.

I first thought of placing the product on the wall, but since it is part of my new living room design project (Red Room Dimension) it could not hang on the wall due to the red curtains blocking the walls. I therefore found a typical floorlamp and worked out from that using 3D design. It also looks more stylish with the robust chrome bar and floor stand together with neon lights and transparent design!

Due to the materials used it would not be sexy to place a 6cm think box on the wall anyway.

The 1.15m in height display stand consists of some old hardware mixed with new parts. Its all based on a 15 inch TFT display and a almost noiseless minipc running at 233Mhz. A single power cable is needed, and I DO hate cables!.

The final price for the product is kept to a minimum and the goal was using old parts as much as possible. This because I had too much garbage lying around, and I wanted to get rid of it! You don't need any more power if you're showing still pictures anyway.

Later this idea involved more into the visual apperance, and I added neon lights and a 3D graphical and visual eye-candy screen saver as the general startup application running in Windows ME.

The screen saver had to be NON Direct3D which was very hard to find. Eventually I found the Particle Systems ScreenSaver by Mephzara to work somewhat okey on a 233MHz old minipc.

SODAS was quite fast and easy to build. 2 weeks was used on the 3D model where I could place all the parts needed and make sure I had no surprises when constructing the real physical thing. As always I only model about 50-80% of the unit before I stop. Therefore the 3D model renderings are not always showing the full product, it's generally used as a visual aid and also works as sexy presentation material!

Further the research and pretesting period took 1 week, the physical construction took about 1 week, but delays in the power supply department pushed the project forward by 2 months!



Other than this, there is no magic involved. A 12v power supply, a 5v power supply, 10GB HD, 233Mhz MiniPC, 64MB ram, 2 neon lights, some cables and plexiglass....thats it. Powered by a single 220V cable and no exterior equipment is needed. No keyboard, no mice, no network, no USB, no floppy. Just K.I.S.S it!

But all in all, it resulted in a slient and unique floorstand based display furniture that will either show animated 3D particle artwork or just showing digital photos in a looped slideshow - in any case it will for certain liven up the environment and amaze its spectators :)

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