Skip to main content

Just in time for Burning Man – Jellyfish 12000 up for grabs

Jellyfish 12000 - Jellydome 4.0 - Halloween 2016
If you’re heading to Burning Man next week, you still have a chance to be a major participant with your own art car. Also called mutant vehicles, these fully customized mobile parties include lights, sound, and dance floors. One of the most well known, The Amazing Jellyfish From The Year 12000 aka Jellyfish 12000, is for sale on eBay for $88,000.

Essentially, the winning bidder will get a portable two-level dance studio with audio, lights, and DJ booth set up and ready to go. The designer/builders described Jellyfish12000 as a “mobile, technological, interactive piece of mid-century modern sci-fi sculpture.” The mutant vehicle is powered by a quiet Honda EU3000 generator hidden under the floor with a breathing snorkel.

According to the eBay listing, Jellyfish 12000 is built on a 1978 Dodge Sportsman van chassis with a 1-ton axle and V8 engine. It’s 12.5 feet tall, 17 feet wide, and 24 feet long — all listed measurements describe the vehicle when it is set up to party. It has an airbag suspension and weighs 9,500 pounds.

The motorized mutant seats 18 and can carry 23 people, even when moving slowly across the desert. The 5,700-watt audio system is lighted and animated by an “audio-reactive network of 3600 24-bit RGB LEDs” running custom software.

According to the listing, Jellyfish 12000 cost more than $140,000 in materials, audio equipment, computer equipment, and electronics. Labor included more than $200,000 in time value for more than 7,500 person hours from software, electrical, and mechanical engineers, artists, craftspeople, welders, and mechanics.

Jellyfish 12000 is already registered for Burning Man 2016, held this year from August 28 to September 5. If you buy it, the purchase includes training. A one-year support contract is negotiable.

Jellyfish 12000 isn’t only suitable for Burning Man. You can take it to other events or parties. If you’re not interested in buying your own mutant vehicle but want to head out to Burning Man, ticket info is here.

Editors' Recommendations

Bruce Brown
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more