Invisible Sphere is a 5.5 foot diameter sphere covered with video monitors and surveillance cameras. Each monitor displays live video feed from a camera placed on the opposite side of the sphere. The sphere can be rolled around in its environment. It is a surveillance device that reveals what is just beyond it.
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A great comedy device, too. You can roll it right over people and they have no idea it's coming....;)
I'm sure it would look very fine hanging from the ceiling of your nightclub and slowly rotating. Somebody should buy you one.
Except if you looked up at it from below, all you'd see is the ceiling.
You could put lights on the ceiling...
Funny. We were just standing around at work today, talking about building something similar out of underwater cameras to achieve spherical coverage. That's really interesting.
That'd also a good source of QTVR video...
Absolutely fascinating. That's just wild.
What sphere? I don't see any sphere!
(Do I win the most obvious response award?)
great minds obviously...no, great minds think alike of obvious...no, that's obvious things that great alike...well, you know.:)
Is it weird that my first thought was "that many CRTs have to suck up a lot of power; I wonder if the power source is internal or external?" My next thought was musing about how to construct a little gasoline generator that would work when tipped to any angle and/or how to suspend one in a sort of gyroscope, yet still be able to run wires to it without them getting tangled up.
Well, it looks like there's a big old cable coming out of it.
I had this remote control toy years ago that was a sphere. The guts of it hung from an axle in the middle, and it moved forward/back by applying force to the axle, and steered by tilting its guts left and right. So that kind of approach might work with something like this, though that gives you degrees of motion that are much more wheel-like than ball-like. I always thought that toy would have worked better as two nested spheres with right-angle axes.
My first thought was some combination of rotary union joints (like http://www.dynamicsealing.com/) which would let you swivel a fuel line in 2D. You'd need to come up with some weird combination of joints to do it in 3D, though.
Or design your floor with tons of brass strips in a grid that have AC running through them, like a giant mesh of slotcar track, and then have power brushes all over the ball, so at any time, it's touching at least two strips on the mesh. As an added feature, anyone trying to walk across the floor would probably get electrocuted.
This reminds me of the episode of Invader Zim where Zim obtains a giant, "invisible" robot. Only problem is, when the robot goes invisible, you can still see Zim, sitting in the pilot seat.
Zim: Now, fight an enemy you cannot see!Dib: You're right there!Zim: ... What?
Empty sphere, generator on wheels... an all terrain vehicle in a bubble. Power supplied to the monitor's grid in the same way trolley busses or bumper cars get their power... a live wire on the end of a pole...
Make the thing open up, ride your ATV in there, and drive your magic sphere around town.
)))))))))
The laws of optics say "nooooooooo!"
This is very similar to the television ball in 12 monkeys, but they had less TVs:
it would've fit in just right in brazil as well . . .
Oh, and let me be the first to commend you on your excellent choice of subject line for this post.
Damn. I wanted to do that. "Invisible Sphere" is thoroughly bleh by comparison.
that has to be the coolest completely pointless thing i've ever seen.