TOKYO BALLOON
Tokyo Balloon is a wooden sculpture I constructed that is based on an image I took in Tokyo. Check out my instructable for detailed description of how to convert an image into a dowel rod sculpture!
Here is the idea. Every digital image is made up of many tiny squares (pixels) with each square assigned some intensity value. Very dark regions in the photo have pixels with low intensity values, while regions that are bright (e.g. the balloon) have high intensity values. Usually there are so many pixels that images appear continuous, but if you continue to zoom in on any image on your computer you will see it is actually made up of many pixels. You can visualize this by looking at a down-sampled image of my Tokyo photo. You can also think of the intensity values at each pixel in the image as a height. The bright regions have a high height, and the dark regions have a low height. I cut dowel rods of different heights depending on the intensity (height) of each pixel. The plots and videos help to visualize how to go from a color image to an 3D structure (red is high, blue is low). |
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tilt from Jon Bumstead on Vimeo. |
Click to rotate 3D structure
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CONSTRUCTIONUsing a 82.5 by 123 cm piece of plywood, I drilled holes which correspond to pixels in the image. There are a total of 4240 holes (pixels). Amazingly, this is only 2% of the actual number of pixels in the image. To construct Tokyo Balloon, I cut dowel rods of different heights depending on the intensity (height) of each pixel. Drilling so many holes the same depth was made possible by the wooden guide shown here. After drilling was complete, the board was painted according to contour lines.
Several computer programs were written to cut the dowel rods efficiently. A video describing these programs is shown below. It took me two years to complete. |