h a l f b a k e r yIf ever there was a time we needed a bowlologist, it's now.
add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, best, random
news, help, about, links, report a problem
browse anonymously,
or get an account
and write.
register,
|
|
|
"If you convert your bicycle to become a
Cycloscope, folk who see you riding by
will
be treated to the spectacle of seeing the
frantic hare that perpetually pursues the
casual tortoise."
"Is that so Stefan?" his old friend Gustaf
exclaimed, his eyebrows raised
quizzically.
- I’d
like to see that”. "I'd better explain it
all to you then."
To get started you need a copy of
Eadweard Muybridge's book of
photographs "Animals in motion" and
make copies of the running hare and the
crawling tortoise.
You then need to transfer the sequences
unto metal sheets and cut out the
individual animal frames with a piercing
saw. Once you have cut them out, you
space the hares out equally and attach
them to the spokes of the rear wheel in a
circle just inside the edge of the tyre.
You
do the same with the tortoise on the
front
wheel.
The second installation consists of two
small strobe lights which are attached to
each wheel, and are directed towards the
point of contact of the wheel and the
road.
These are synchronised to flash once as
each animal is at the lowest point in its
circular travel. This results in the animal
being illuminated like a film reel.
Everything is now in place for you to
demonstrate your new Cycloscope. Now
as
you cycle along the flashing strobe will
have the effect of creating an animation
of
both the tortoise and the hare, but
forever
separated by the fixed space between the
front and back wheels.
For really dramatic effect, attach it all to
a
penny-farthing style bike. The frantically
running hare on the tiny rear wheel then
pursues the sedately confident tortoise,
ambling along on the gently turning
large
orbit of the front wheel.
For even more fun, chose other animals:
eg a giraffe can be seen chasing a
leopard.
or a small naked man can run after a
large
pigeon.
Eadweard Muybridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muybridge
human figure and animals in motion [xenzag, Mar 09 2007]
Penny Farthing
http://www.museumso...m/knock/knock27.jpg
would look good on one of these [xenzag, Mar 09 2007]
Please log in.
If you're not logged in,
you can see what this page
looks like, but you will
not be able to add anything.
Annotation:
|
| |
Actually, if you cycle at night in a well-lit city, you won't need your own strobe light as gas-discharge streetlights strobe (in the UK) at 50Hz. |
|
| |
I know that, but you need to synch the
flashes with the speed of the bicycle so
you do need the strobe. If you relied on
street lamps, the wheels would have to
turn at 50 revs per sec and be equipped
with a shutter mechanism..... this is
rather impractical. |
|
| |
Not really - you don't need a shutter mechanism because the streetlamp is a strobe light. If you travel 10mph on 27" diameter wheels your wheels rotate almost exactly twice per second so the images spaced around your wheel will appear animated but also racing around the wheel as you travel. |
|
| |
small ...... naked .....man......running .... after......a....... pigeon??????? |
|
| |
you could be right Hippo... wouldn't be
too hard to test it out - I already have
easy access
to all Muybridge books. Strobe would
provide intense focus on one area
though, and create illusion of figures
running along at ground level. |
|
| |
You don't need a streetlamp, you can use spoke clickers! Simply point a microphone Blumlein-pair at a set of spoke clickers, and using a portable spectrum analyser and tap-tempo detector, trigger a midi clock gen, which then gets converted to SMTPE, which can sync to a video framestore of a sequence of still photographs of the tortoise, which it projects using a xenon flash tube modified video projector to some smoke in the area in front of the wheel. The same sort of scheme for the thing at the back. |
|
| |
I once stuffed a magnet in the spokes of my bike and taped a magnetic reed switch to the forks to get a signal each time the wheel rotated. (I took wires up to a calculator, soldered them across the "=" button, and had it constantly add the wheel circumference to make an odometer.) |
|
| |
You could stick an LED inside each cutout and have it flash. |
|
| |
This idea is clever and would look great. [+] |
|
| |
Slotted full wheel covers would work in daylight, the cutouts would 'strobe' as they passed the slot. You could even have different animals on the wheels spaced as different radii. Moving the slot closer or farther from the axle would select which animation to run. |
|
| |
This is awesome wow [xenzag] + |
|
| |
It's great, and the strobe will help with vis at night |
|
| |
[Ian], I just re-read your anno, again. That was beautiful. (I should have said so earlier.) |
|
| |
Can I have running hamsters on mine? |
|
| |