The Sky Egg

After a lot of hard work Heather has launched her site, Sky Egg, a "creative site for children of all ages." Be sure to check out the fun picture books and crafts!

Another version of the lego video

Just for fun you can compare the encoding from Google with YouTube.

Lego Robot Fight

Back in April we made this stop-action short of two Lego robots fighting. It took about 160 photos and some time to tweak the software to about 8fps, but the result is rather entertaining (at least for me). The real trick is using video editing software that will allow a very short duration between photos in a slideshow. I used Windows Movie Maker, which allows about 1/8th a second minimum. The rest is just adding the sound track.

3D Painted Rooms

In college I took a graphics arts class for fun and applied my engineering skills to it. In two cut paper projects, I applied mathematics to design shapes that looked correct when viewed straight-on, but were actually fairly large three-dimensional structures.

This technique was a lot of fun; in fact the second project required a computer program to calculate the dimensions of all the paper items I had to cut out.

Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to a similar technique applied to a more massive scale: Messing with the Optical Mind. This looks like something really cool to do with a boring hallway in your house, although I think I would use less dramatic colors.