Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Giant 3D Zoetrope Is Mesmerizing”.
My name is stefan price and i brought a three-dimensional stroboscopic zolotrope that i call the marvelous mechanical makey making machine the three-dimensional. Scroposcopic zoetrope is a very complicated way of saying that is a a variation off of the traditional zootrope that was developed in the 1850s, and usually what people are familiar with is a drum with slits, and you usually put a paper two-dimensional animation inside and, as you Spin, it you look through the slits and you can see the animation start to move and in the 1850s was when we discovered this principle of tricking, the brain that the uh the time it takes for the the eye to process the imagery into the brain takes About a tenth of a second, so we know if we can flash a flash, a series of successive images one after another, faster than one tenth of a second. We can start to create an illusion of motion, and that is the basis for every bit of media. That we watch today from animation and film to even the digital screens that we watch are all based off of persistence of visions. There was uh, there was a learning curve because i’d never actually seen one in person.
I’D only ever seen them as youtube. Videos myself and i was really excited to try to actually build something, but not having any idea of like the the math that went in into all of it. It was a little bit of a learning curve, but um, it was just sort of you know an experiment, and i really see this as version kind of you know, 0.0 uh in my progression of building zoetropes – and i have i’ve built a couple more since then – That are all still kind of working up to what i hope will be the the kind of ultimate expression of what of everything i’ve learned from building three-dimensional. Stroboscopic zoetropes i cut things by hand.
We did laser cutting for a lot of the parts we did. Some 3d modeling and 3d printing for the arms and the legs. The head was a ping-pong ball that i filled with resin drilled out the eye holes made a mold out of silicone. All the parts were molded in silicone and i cast them out of resin, with the exception of the body we just didn’t have the time we were in a major crunch to get it done before maker faire.
We had only had the idea just a few weeks before, and so we cut wood blocks and i shaped them and carved them in you know traditional woodworking and then i lasered the m logo into the front, and so we used a little bit of traditional a Little bit of digital fabrication and a little bit of just getting it done as fast as we can. I figured i’d kind of play with the idea that it’s a makey inspired zoatrope, so i called it the maker, trope and makertropes.com i’m starting to try to put some information about how we built it and all of the kind of details of the the science behind It are slowly getting uploaded when i’ve got time. [ Applause, ], .