Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Smart Home
  3. Videos

This projection-mapped Christmas tree is the Tannenbaum

Be dazzled by this projection-mapped Christmas tree

Jenny McGrath
By


If you want to put out the bare minimum of decorating effort, you can buy pre-lit Christmas trees. They’ve already been strung with lights, and all you have to do is hang the handmade ornaments you’ve had since grade school. Or you can buy a fake fir with chintzy balls and tinsel already adorned. Brazil studio Ambos took a more high-tech approach to decking out its tree: projection mapping.

Think of the projector you have in your conference room. While it projects images on a screen, with projection mapping, that same device is used on a non-flat surface — like at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, which projects images on fake heads to make them look alive. To make its projection-mapped Christmas tree, Ambos digitally rendered a tree in 3D, created the projections on a screen, then projected the images onto an actual tree, according to Fast Co. Considering how obsessed my cat is with ornaments, I can see the appeal, but then again, he may take a projection-mapped tree as his own personal laser light show to pounce upon.

Recommended Videos

Projection mapping is often used to temporarily transform buildings, too. Earlier this year, the Sydney Opera House invited several artists to project animations on its iconic facade. It’s typically a CGI-heavy display, but Universal Everything took a different approach with hand-drawn animations.

“In contrast to previous years’ artists’ use of advanced CGI, our analog, handmade animation process reveals a human soul in the drawings,” Universal Everything Founder Matt Pyke said in a press release. “Due to the use of traditional animation techniques, this film could have existed in 1920, albeit with a 21st-century twist — bringing our influences of global pop culture, modernist graphics, and physics simulations into a playful exploration of this iconic building.”

Related

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jenny McGrath
Jenny McGrath
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jenny McGrath is a senior writer at Digital Trends covering the intersection of tech and the arts and the environment. Before…
The star of the world’s tiniest stop-motion movie is the size of a grain of dust
worlds tiniest stop motion video 300 microns 2269207

STARDUST ODYSSEY by Tibo PINSARD (official)

As Kevin Hart, Kristen Bell, and Tom Cruise all prove, you don’t need to be a giant to make it as a giant movie star. But those actors have nothing on the lead performer in the Guinness World Record-winning short film Starship Odyssey, whose lead character is just 300 microns tall. To put that in perspective, it’s just 0.3 millimeters or approximately the size of a single grain of dust. The short film has been officially recognized for having the smallest 3D stop-motion animation character in history.

Read more
Clever topology means this 3D-printed polymer is tough enough to stop a bullet
rice university 3d printed polymer stops bullets 1111 impact 1 web

You’ve probably heard of 3D-printed guns, but how about a 3D-printed material that's capable of stopping bullets in their tracks? That’s what researchers from Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering may have developed with a new polymer that's almost as hard as diamonds despite being a lightweight material that’s full of holes.

The material is based on something called a tubulane, a complex structure of cross-linked carbon nanotubes first suggested by scientists in the early 1990s. Despite how theoretically exciting tubulanes might be, people have been unable to create them in reality. Using the idea as the basis for a polymer structure could well be the next best thing.

Read more
3D-printing system can spit out custom-fitted bionic hands in under 10 hours
3d printed bionic hands 10 hours hand

There have been some pretty darn impressive examples of 3D-printed powered prostheses, aka bionic hands, that we’ve covered at Digital Trends. But getting them to the people who need them as quickly as possible is still something of a hurdle. Thanks to engineers at the U.K.’s University of Warwick and its industry partners, however, those days may be coming to an end.

They have developed and showcased a new system that allows for the creation of made-to-measure, 3D-printed bionic hands in just 10 hours. Their breakthrough system is the latest step in a mission to make similar prostheses available to partial amputees in as expedient a manner as possible. The project was funded -- to the tune of $1.1 million -- by the government-run agency Innovate U.K.

Read more