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Science Club
  1. Does Black Bark Mulch Help Keep Moisture in the Soil?
  2. How Much Water does a Fountain Use?
  3. Find your Body Surface Area
  4. How Fast do French Fries Cool Down?
  5. My Year of Coincidences
  6. Which Firework is the Loudest?
  7. Cost to store a VHS tape in a NYC apartment?
  8. Guess Your Blood Alcohol Level Booth
  9. Find the Loudest Restaurant in Sacramento
  10. How Much do Clothes Weigh?
  11. Trying to Make Clear Ice
  12. Searching the Indian Ocean for a Plane Crash
  13. Electronic Cigarettes - The Fog Machine for Your Face
  14. Scott Leased an Electric Ford Focus
  15. Testing the Effectiveness of a Beer Cozy
  16. Eggshells vs. Taco Shells
  17. How Ice Rinks are Made
  18. Shaken vs. Stirred
  19. Real Appliance Energy Use Tests
  20. Christmas Lights Power Cost
  21. The Best Cold Drink Cup
  22. LED vs. Regular Bulbs & CFLs
  23. Coldest drink in town?
  24. Using Salt to Cool Down Beer
  25. Coors Light Cold Indicator
  26. The Fastest Way to Cool Down Beer
  27. Hairdryer vs. Bowl of Water
  28. Bathroom During a Movie?
  29. Video Projector on a Disco Ball
  30. Cool Trunk
  31. The weight of popcorn
  32. Sunchips bag decomposition
  33. Disscating a cockroach
  34. Sensefly Drone Camera
  35. Entrance Locked
  36. End Rubbernecking
  37. Eyeclops Night Vision
  38. Miracle Fruit Taste Test
  39. Hot Air Bubbles
  40. Helium Bubbles
  41. Neighborhood Speed Trap
  42. Pizza Race
  43. Eyeclops - Bionic Magnifier
  44. Breathalyzer Testing
  45. Fishing Line Fiberoptics
  46. The Value of CFL Bulbs
  47. Barry Marshall Fan Page
  48. Bottling the Keg Leftovers
  49. Spinning Rim Centrifuge
  50. Backwash Experiments
  51. sidewalk chalk
  52. Red Hot Vioxx Action!
  53. Balloon Delivery
  54. Tanning
  55. Making a Candle Out of Lipstick
  56. Evaporation
  57. The lift of a Helium Balloon
  58. Lard Candle
  59. The Properties of Heat Transfer
  60. Insulation Testing
  61. Eating Out
  62. Eating In
  63. Tattoo Removal
  64. Drying Laundry
  65. Viscosity Testing
  66. Magazine Advertising
  67. Collecting Data
  68. Dropping Toast
  69. Refilling an Ink Cartridge
  70. Tampons
  71. Light Bulbs


























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In hopes of creating an interesting visual effect for future parties, I aimed my toy video projector onto a disco ball.

Part of the appeal of a disco ball is that can be difficult to discern exactly what is happening when the ball is lighting a room. The closely-packed mirrors break up a single beam of light, and spray it all over.


It's a simple device which creates an extremely complex display.


I was curious what the effect would be if I used a video projector instead of a standard spotlight. I had no idea if I'd be able to see the movie as the ball rotated. If I could, I would be remarkably close to creating the world's first four dimentional television.

Long a fan of the Jakks Pacific line of Eyeclops toys, I had their portable video projector.

I had also purchased an RCA video cable for my iphone, enabling me to project YouTube videos from my phone.



So, I was completely portable, armed with a $99 toy projector. Here's a shot of the image quality, projected onto the door of our "Abstrakt" Ikea kitchen cabinet.


I used The Sounds Painted by Numbers video for my experiments.

The mirror facets scatter the light like a concave lens. Upon striking the ball, my projected image, like a spotlight, is reflected and scattered.

The unfortunate result is that the broken image was too scattered for my brain to reassemble. Each reflection was only a half-inch square, four inches from each of its neighbors.


A single bit of the reflected image is enlarged above.

Note the red, yellow, blue and green outlines of this portion. Those colors aren't part of the video, and they are visible on every part of the reflected image. My first thought was that this color frame is caused by chromatic abberation, but it probably is just a glimpse into the arrangement of the colored LEDs inside the projector.

 

Spinning the disco ball helped. The spinning created a unified band of the image, although the bands were still several inches away from each other. It was interesting, but it wasn't awesome.

Disco balls are incredible. They are so simple: a ball covered in mirrors. They literally could have been invented 200 years ago. It was irresistable to me to try to extend their effect into the age of the cheap video projector, but the truth is, the results using a video projector aren't much better than using a plain red spotlight.

Sometimes awesome plus awesome results in awesome squared. This was not one of those times.

I guess I'm going back to my lab at the roller disco.

 

  How to Dessicate a Cockroach   Eyeclops Digital Magnifier   Trying to make hot air bubbles   Eyeclops Night Vision goggles   The weight of popcorn   How to Eliminate Rubbernecking   My Homemade Speed Trap 
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