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Big Box of Bigness – How to Blow Something Up

 

Expellenormous

So you want to make something big? Whether you’re going through a rough breakup and wish your chocolate bar was twice your size, or you have a savior complex and wish to end world hunger with a single fish and a lone loaf of bread, the ability to make anything grow in scale would undeniably useful. The world of science would be abound with antithetically fantastic voyages, GMOs would yield to DMO’s (Dimensionally modified organisms), and Frank Gehry would finally be out of a job, but how would we bring this wonderful reality about?

Back to Basics

What muggle technology makes things big? Microscopes!

What’s the difference between what a microscope does, and what Ant-man Giant-man does? The third dimension.

Luckily, a Strange man taught me some perceptual hoo-doo that allows me to essentially add dimension together, compositing a few two-dimensional realities to synthesize the illusion of an obscured third.

Test Room #1 - Backend Interface

Unfortunately the same man failed to tech me how to magically capture two dimensional recording, so for that part I am restricted to muggle technology.

Dimensional Synthesis Error – Universal Bus Controller (Code 43)

Magic is easy, technology is a bit harder. As it turns out creating new dimensions is all about your hardware – specifically the capacity of your USB bus controllers. Now, obviously there are easier solutions for processing unholy amounts of video information, but Blackmagic involves delving into the dark arts and truckloads of cash.

(Updates to follow)

Microfilming Apparatus

Technology Development

 

Side Effects May Include: Pinching (Dismemberment), Dual Personality Syndrome, and/or Murder

For those of you looking for a once-a-day solution for natural enhancement, this is not the enchanted object you are looking for. Aside from being fundamentally different from the Engorgement Charm of the Potter-verse – which increases the amount of something without increasing the quantity – this magic box has the unique quirk of copying, and displacing the objects it enlarges. BYO suicide tank.

Suicide tanks that enabled the teleportation “illusion” featured in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige

The idea is simple enough, a spell to make something bigger. Yet somewhere along the way it all went horribly sideways, and when you’re already so invested in breaking the laws of nature it’s all too easy not to stop yourself when you finally realize you’ve gone. too. far.

#OtherSelfie

Appications
Content 02Content 03 Content 01


Final Prez & The Start of Class – Robyn

Concept: A professor/lecturer/teacher who’s presentation is messing with them/is being werid behind their back.

Method: learn a lot about color, make a really interesting presentation and then mess with it.

First: Research, figure out what I was going to say about color!

I started with a substantial stack of books on color. History of color, theory of color, atlas of color, design of color. Even a book called All About Color. Overall I acquired about half of MIT’s section on the topic of color.

2015-05-02 15.58.23

I learned that my favorite color is cerulean blue, is made from cobalt stannate and was invented in 1805 by Andreas Hopfner. I learned that cats and dogs are not actually color blind, they just see a less vibrant form of colors. I learned how much the development of aluminum paint tubes in 1841 enabled the explosion of color in art in recent art history.

I dug through books of color and websites of color, compiling interesting snippets and stories that began to take shape in an interesting cohesiveness. My ideas evolved on a whiteboard, flowing and connecting together,

WhiteBoard

Unfortunately I promptly realized that I had a ton of info on color but that doesn’t make a trick. At this point I switched to working on mechanics. (As a result, many interesting mechanics (++), far too large a scope (–).)

The concepts I wanted to play with were,

  • Extra space on screen, that is assumed to not exist because the presentations don’t usually use it
  • A connection between how you interact with the screen and what it shows (smudging, moving, ect.)

Final presentation gag components:

  • Spazzy color/projector trouble start
  • Face recognition, spazzy or normal.
  • Presentation picture tilt with computer tilt
  • Presentation drifting around on screen, drifts off, ½ slide on the top ½ on the bottom, starts scrolling the slide top to bottom while talking about slide.
  • Smudging of presentation picture like water
  • Presentation starts drifting again and drifts all the way off the screen.

Video walk-through of technical components performance,

Spazzy start, Spazy Start

Face responding spazzyness, Face Flicker

First slide fade, Slide Fade

Presentation, Prez Slides Start

Tilt (synced with laptop screen tilt), Tilt Slide

(futuristic) Slides sliding around

Presentation, Prez Slides MIddle

Ophelia Muddle, Ophelia

End of presentation & thank you, Prez Slides End

(futuristic) slide before thank you slides off screen, end.

 

Video of all components,

GitHub of code components, (coming soon)

 

Challenges I faced and retrospective solutions:

  1. Getting started without a concrete idea of what I was trying to do
    a. Just start doing things (EARLY) and see what happens.
    b. Start with a one-day concept proving sketch of idea & iterate!
  2. Wanting to do too much with too many different sorts of mechanics
    a. REALLY be aware of where the achievable/not plausible line is and stay on the possible side of it. (also see 1.b. )

Lessons learned:

1) Split up projects, draft/mock-up super simple proof of concept ideas. (Do drafts, lots of early drafts, iterate and develop your idea)
2) Don’t be intimidated by things I’m not sure I can do, (ex, how to be funny??) just try and see what happens!
3) Technically excellence is worth 0 if it doesn’t work. (Keep it simple stupid) Ie, ACTUALLY be realistic with what you can accomplish.
4) Before starting the meat of a programming project plan what you’re going to do/the best way to set the program. (ex, if/else vs. switch statements.
5) I can code anything I want, it will just take a looong time.
6) Don’t be intimidated by the actually really fun part! Performing for people!

 

Final Project Documentation — Let There Be Light

Magic Final Documentation

###############################################################
Script of the trick:
###############################################################
*magician stands next to a table with a black TV screen (facing the audience) and a black box*

The wizards of legend had amazing powers: the ability to make things disappear, the ability to move things without touching them, the ability to fly. In comparison, the “magic” performed by current magicians is trivial: sleight of hand and clever contraptions to befuddle people. But I wanted to return to the time when being magical meant being powerful. As powerful as a God. And on the first day of creation, what did God say? Let there be light.

*magician waves hand over device sitting on the table in front of him*

*device starts shining brightly*

Of course magic is only magical if it transcends boundaries: the laws of physics, the expectations of common folk, and sometimes… real physical boundaries.

*Bring audience member on stage, hand them a silicon box made to look like steel*

(to audience member) This is a metal box, correct? Go ahead, pick it up and feel it. Can you confirm it’s made of real metal? Awesome, thanks. Go ahead and place that over the device. Now for those of you out there who aren’t big physics nerds, it isn’t possible to send any sort of signal through solid metal using any of the technologies in our cell phones, computers, and everything else. You see, metal reflects electromagnetic waves, so for anyone who thought I was doing something tricky with wireless communication, explain this one.

*wave hand over box*

(to audience member) Now, go ahead and remove the box.

*device is shining, cover it up again*

(repeat procedure, asking audience members whether to turn it on or off each time so they you know you truly have control over whether it turns on or off)

*excuse the audience member back to their seat*

When it comes to light, I’m a bit biased. I have a particular source of light that I prefer above all others: fire. That’s right, I’m a total pyro, proud of it. My runescape username was actually irishpyro94 for all of middle school. True story.

Now, as a natural element, fire is inherently more difficult to control that manmade light sources like those I was controlling before. This doesn’t always go well, so I’m going to back up from my target a little bit in case something goes wrong. *looks at people in front row* Um, you guys all turned in your liability waivers right? Ok, good.

*walk to other side of stage*

Alright, who want to see some fire!?

*gesture as if shooting a fireball a la Dragon Ball Z, TV screen suddenly turns on, showing a picture of a blazing fire, sound effects*

*applause*

Thank you!

###############################################################
End script
###############################################################

This trick gives the illusion of generating fire and light at one’s will. The script above describes the ideal version of the trick which I didn’t have time to fully implement unfortunately. I will describe the technology I used to perform a first approximation of the above.

There are two primary technical components: an infrared-based module for the up-close magic and a Bluetooth-based trick for the fire trick. I will discuss the infrared technology first.

########################
INFRARED
########################
IR Transmitter
2015-05-17 16.06.36

The magician needs an IR LED attached to his wrist with an appropriate power supply hidden up his sleeve. In my trick, I used a breadboarded Arduino circuit. I powered an Arduino Nano (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardNano) from a 9V battery. Then I passed the 5V rail through an appropriately sized resistor to limit the current, then through the IR led and finally to ground. I taped this LED to the bottom of my palm near my wrist, positioned such that it was covered up by the sleeves of my coat unless I extend my arms in front of me, as I do when flourishing my hands over the device in the trick. The LED I used turned out to be highly directional, only shining in a narrow beam. A better choice would be an omnidirectional light source, though then the magician would need a way to tell the LED when to turn on (as opposed to my setup, where the LED was always on). This could be accomplished with a flesh-colored flex sensor on the magician’s palm that can tell when the magician’s hand is flexed open.

IR Receiver

2015-05-17 16.06.56

The device that actually lights up needs only 3 components: a power source, an IR sensor, and a light source. I used an Arduino Nano powered via USB from my computer, though in the ideal performance the device would be battery-powered. I used an IR sensor with an integrated thresholding circuit, but the sensitivity could be better tuned if a discrete photodiode was used with the output current being read by a microcontroller that does the thresholding calculation. For the light source, I used three standard LEDs, one of each red, green, and blue. This results in an interesting iridescent effect because your eye doesn’t know whether to interpret the light as white or as discrete colors.

Ideally, this device would be packaged in an interesting way, perhaps to look like an orb or crystal ball of some sort, like the one in Gandalf’s staff that he used in Moira and to drive away the Nazgul during the Gondorian retreat from Osgiliath.

The silicon box mentioned in the script is an interesting touch that I wish I could have implemented. Silicon is transparent at IR wavelengths, but opaque to visible light. I tried to leverage the fact that it looks like metal to convince any skeptics in the audience.

Here you can see the IR system in operation.

2015-05-17 16.09.57

########################
BLUETOOTH
########################
The final part of the trick involves “lighting the TV on fire”. This is done through Bluetooth signalling between the magician and the computer controlling the TV. In the script, I described a TV monitor to display the fire, but in the trick I performed, I used a laptop. Using a larger screen is better for dramatic effect, and if it can be powered wirelessly using resonant magnetic induction, that adds another impressive element to the trick, that would be extra impressive. Then there could be some banter about the energy of the fire powering the screen or something.

Bluetooth transmitter

2015-05-17 16.08.13

On the magicians side, there is an Arduino Nano wired to an HC-05 Bluetooth module (http://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-converter-serial-communication-master/dp/B008AVPE6Q). The Arduino is continuously reading in analog voltage values from a potentiometer voltage divider circuit. These 0-5V voltages are converted to a 10-bit binary value (0-1024 in decimal). This decimal value is sent to the HC-05 using the SoftwareSerial Arduino module, and the HC-05 automatically transfers those values to the device with which it is paired. The magician need to discreetly rotate the potentiometer dial counterclockwise during the “fireball throwing flourish”, thus signalling to the TV to display fire. Alternatively, there can just be a discreet button and the Arduino can wait for it to be pressed, which would have been way simpler and more robust than the potentiometer method. Lesson learned.

The code for this is found at https://github.com/colinmcd94/magic/blob/master/magic_analog_tx/magic_analog_tx.ino.
For anyone who wants to use bluetooth communication for any reason, I have a skeleton file for using HC-05 with Arduino+SoftwareSerial here: https://github.com/colinmcd94/magic/blob/master/magic_bluetooth/magic_bluetooth.ino.

Bluetooth reciever
I paired my Mac with the HC-05 module, which is fairly easy to do from System Preferences. If the pairing initially fails, click Options and enter the code 1234 into the box. This is the default code for all HC-05 modules.

[Screenshot 2015-05-17 16.11.33

My computer was running a shell script that connected to the HC-05 serial port using the stty command and received a data packet every 2 seconds or so. This script can be found at https://github.com/colinmcd94/magic/blob/master/fire.sh. You can see the values written to the terminal change as I rotate the potentiometer knob, and when the values falls below 100 (corresponding to about half a volt), my computer opens Safari and shows a video of fire. This is a webpage I wrote available at http://mcdonnell.mit.edu/human/magicfire.html. It uses bigvideo.js to display a video across the whole screen.

Here, you can see the Bluetooth system in operation. You can see the decimal voltage readings being transferred to the shell script running in Terminal, and the “catching fire” in action.

2015-05-17 16.16.07

Genie and the Lamp: 2015 Edition

My final project was a modern take on the Genie and the Lamp story, in which I free a super-intelligent AI from a locked Faraday Cage. Along the way, we have a conversation about the nature of magic and deception.

The role of the AI was played by a Google Nexus Q, a discontinued media streamer/Android device from 2012. The Q is small, black, spherical, and contains a programmable LED ring, all of which (combined with its obscurity/unfamiliarity) give it a very other-worldly, mystical feeling.

1.1340820048

Setup

The Q sat inside a hinged black cubical box, and was attached to the projector and speakers. The performance was scripted and directed by two complementary Android applications (source available here), one running on the Nexus Q, and one running on my phone. The phone served as a remote – the volume buttons advanced the script running on the Q from line to line. This let me talk for as long as I wanted during our conversation, and still have the AI enter at the perfect time.

I also made use of my NFC deck from my previous project. This was just placed on the table as well.

Technicals

The Nexus Q required a bit of hacking. I unlocked, rooted, and installed CyanogenMod 11 (based on Android 4.4), just to be able to run the app I developed. I used Google’s Text-To-Speech service (UK English) as the voice of the AI, and used a Parse app for communication between the remote and the Q. I had hoped to use Bluetooth for the remote, since I thought it would be faster and more reliable (especially inside the Media Lab), but the Parse app was simpler to set up and easier to use.

In the middle of the trick, the AI prints out the secret card in ASCII Art. I used this service to convert the a PNG of the card to ASCII art, 100 pixels wide. The “print” function was randomly timed to simulate the erratic output of terminals. Throughout the performance, the AI also printed small, easter-egg-style comments or status messages, for the alter audience members to appreciate.

Content

I tried to make the start a little bit of surprise. In the story, I just happen to come across the AI, so when starting the performance I pretended to have forgotten something in my seat and was on my way to retrieve it when the closed black box called out for help to me.

From there, I acted out the story of meeting the AI, learning about its past, and receiving an offer for it to grant me one wish, a custom it learned from the internet that it thought to be appropriate in this scenario. I wished to be a magician, and from there began a conversation about deception that became the theme and message of the story: that deception can be used to give people experiences that are valuable because of their impossibility.

Along the way, I performed a card trick involving my phone and a NFC-tagged deck, to demonstrate the philosophy that I was trying to explain to the AI.

Here’s a video of the full performance:

Review

I put considerably more effort into writing a narrative for this performance than for previous ones, and I feel like it made off in developing a more cohesive trick that both entertained and has a takeaway message. There were a few points that I wish I could have refined, and a few extra polishes I wish I could have added, like the box closing itself at the end or a more elaborate card trick in the middle, but I was satisfied with where I had gotten the production as it was.

I had a blast this semester, and will definitely be recommending it to friends interested in magic. Thanks for running a fabulous class!

Dragons of Arkharis

The king of Arkharis, the Land of Dragons, is a capricious man. Having no heirs,
he decided his successor would be chosen among the most infamous heroes of
the kingdom. He challenged two heroes to prove themselves worthy of the crown
by riding two dragons of a different kind above the castle… The first one to
succeed will be chosen the next ruler of Arkharis!

Game elements:
Board
2 hero pieces
3 decks of cards – green, red and gray

See the PDF: Dragons of Arkharis


Carol and Joel

Is a cocktail a multisensory magic trick?

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About our Everyday Deceptions speaks of mirroring functions in our brains that are important to anticipation. If we use one sense to anticipate another we may end up with convergence as we come to rely on the predictions.

Drastic illusions might happen when we consume highly abstracted foods. We seem to have 21 years of eating minimally abstracted foods until alcohol enters our lives. Things get wacky when you introduce fermentation, infusion, and distillation. 21 years of mostly correctly correlating olfaction and gustation becomes strange when the sweet aromas of a wine do not correlate to its gustatory structure because all its sugars were converted to alcohol. Our linguistic techniques for describing these experiences starts to break down.

So does a lot of the pleasure of drinking alcohol containing beverages rely on all this pent up convergence? is a cocktail a multisensory magic trick?”

http://bostonapothecary.com/advanced-sensory-convergence-basics/