Photonic Products laser blog

How did we miss this laser-scanning super robot vacuum?

Not sure how we missed this robotic vacuum but this bugger uses lasers to scan your room and grab dust and lint as it goes. It’s quite cute how this little fellow does everything the Roomba does but, seemingly, it does it better.

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A Lesson on Gadgets of the Future:

Blame The Jetsons, repeated viewings of Star Wars (the good ones), and half of Will Smith’s movies. Blame whoever you so choose for tricking us into believing that the distant future promised cool gadgets and robots. Lucky for us, the folks over at Motherboard were perturbed about the current lack of time travel abilities—among other promised high-tech goodies—as well.

According to the future of the past, we should be cruising around in flying cars, living forever, and shooting our enemies with death rays so that they won’t live forever. Yet here we are, driving in cars on the ground, dying in our 80s, and having to resort to bullets for our murdering needs. WTF, future?

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We’ve heard of many odd Twitter-related projects, but this one probably takes the cake for sheer innovation. At Instructables, you can find the instructions on how to create a laser tripwire connected to a computer with a webcam, that can take pictures of trespassers and tweet about it.

As you may imagine, creating all that is not exactly a quick walk in the park, but it’s doable. If you’re the imaginative type, you can create complex commands through a bash script and have them executed when the tripwire detects a trespasser.

For full requirements and detailed instructions, head on over to Instructables. You can also check a demonstration video below

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Amazon.com Product Description

Video: FroliCat BOLT

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This holographic laser projector (HLP) projects images onto curved and tilted surfaces. We just got our hands on the tech in the back rooms of CES 2010, and it works beautifully. By using red, blue and green lasers to project large triangles onto a 10-inch area, Light Blue Optics has created Light Touch, resulting in a fascinating laser touchscreen that’s surprisingly interactive.

In our hour-long hands-on session, the touchscreen felt like a capacitive screen, requiring a light touch to move objects. The colors looked just saturated enough to be watchable, and the video wasn’t super-bright even in a dimly-lit room — but it was just clear enough to be useful, and the Class 1 lasers inside won’t burn out your retinas, either. It was an eerie feeling to use this technology, convincing us this is a completely new product category that could change everything. It’s that good.

Light Touch: Holographic Laser Projection is Here Today from DVICE on Vimeo.

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Shadowbeamz is a company which specializes in creating “laser” based music for both the consumer and professional music industries and they showed off their consumer version this week at CES 2010.  

The concept is simple enough, users plug the Shadowbeamz system into their computer and then they choose from the hundreds of available songs. Once a song is chosen the user can play the beats they desire by looking at what sounds are available on their computer screen and then swiping their hands across the corresponding laser. A simple press of the rhythm button and the background music of your choice will become available so you can play along. The ability to change which beats play with each song selection is also available with a quick click of the mouse button.

The lasers on the system are excellent, picking up even the quickest and most slight hand movements I made, while also allowing for multiple instruments to be played.

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CEREAL giant Kellogg’s has defended its laser-etched cornflakes as a genuine technology, not a hoax.

Kellogg’s Australia says the announcement – involving lasers burning the company logo onto individual flakes of cereal – isn’t a fake.

“We’re aware of (cornflake laser-etching) – we are not intending to launch it in Australia,” a local Kellogg’s spokesperson told News.com.au.

The food manufacturer’s UK press office made the announcement yesterday on Twitter.

“Now you’ll always be able to tell your Corn Flakes from your corn fakes!” it said, with a link to an apparently doctored image of individual flakes branded with the company’s logo.

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Back in late May, Red Bull Cola was banned in parts of Germany because it contains about 0.13 micrograms of cocaine per can—enough Bolivian marching powder to… do absolutely nothing to you. Taiwan and Hong Kong also flagged their supplies for containing bits of coca leaves. Red Bull, of course, was hoping for this negative publicity.

Unfortunately for them, the hubbub didn’t create the huge market interest they were anticipating.

Next step in the effort to make their cola the choice of bad boys and girls?

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Fighting with photons

The most famous weapon of science fiction is rapidly becoming fact.

Like so much else in science fiction, the ray gun was invented by H.G. Wells. In the tentacles of Wells’s Martians it was a weapon as unanswerable by earthlings as the Maxim gun in the hands of British troops was unanswerable by Africans.

Science fiction, though, it has remained. Neither hand-held pistols nor giant, orbiting anti-missile versions of the weapon have worked. But that is about to change.

The first serious battlefield ray gun is now being deployed. And the next generation, now in the laboratory, is coming soon.

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The Dreamhive animation studio provided dynamic music video background imagery for Madonna’s recent “Hard Candy” world tour, visually backing up two of the singer’s latest music hits.

For Madonna’s “Hard Candy” world tour and promotional appearances, The Dreamhive created striking animated background imagery for two of Madonna’s most popular songs — “4 Minutes” and “Give it 2 Me”. The imagery was then played during Madonna’s exciting stage performances of the songs during the Hard Candy promotional and concert tours.

For “4 Minutes,” The Dreamhive created footage with a flashing countdown clock that paid homage to Madonna’s music video for the song. Using reference images from the original music video, The Dreamhive created a dynamic CGI version of the practical digital countdown clock, which they then rendered using custom real-time shading code. Additionally, The Dreamhive re-created and animated the “black onyx” effect element seen in the music video, and also generated new effect passes that were then composited into live-action footage shot during the original video production.

“It was a terrific and extremely cool experience, to be adding our visual effects into footage from the set of the music video,” comments Wes Grandmont III, Senior CG Supervisor at The Dreamhive. The Dreamhive’s images mimicked the strong pulse and irresistible hook of the song, and as the images played behind Madonna onstage for the tour, Justin Timberlake then frequently joined the singer for the rest of the “4 Minutes” piece.

For the disco anthem “Give it 2 Me,” The Dreamhive created CG laser work that had an evocative, poppy, 80’s look and feel, and which combined with a live laser show to create a pulse of green and pink light beams flickering disco-style across the dancing crowd.

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