Mirror made of wood Bashny.Net

At New York University to create an interesting installation, called wooden mirror. It was collected in ten months in 1999, and in December the same year, about the unusual material device was published in the magazine Wired. The creators of the mirror emphasize that it is a work of art, not useful in a practical thing.
From the modern "Beauty and the Mirror" looks like this:






Needless to "mirror" frontally more like wooden puzzle, that's a ...


or such ...


... And in the center the "mirror", if you look closely, you can see the eye of the camcorder:


Now, the essence of the device. You've already realized that these chips something much more complex than we can see.
Unusual mirror consists of three main components: a digital camera, a personal Macintosh, 8600 AV and octagonal matrix consisting of wooden bars. "Resolution" of the matrix is ​​35 x 29 pixels, and the area of ​​each point is about 40 mm2. Each of the bars can be deflected up and down by the actuator. The surface of the mirror is illuminated from above by several lamps, and the bar is tilted intensity of light reflected from it varies. Each of the bars can take one of 255 positions, but the number of distinct shades of the display does not exceed a dozen.
Every eight servo motors are connected to the controller. Just a "mirror" There are 108 controllers connected to the computer's serial port to ten. Computer imaging has been using a specially written program in C and package Macromedia Director, which receives the image from the camera and converts it into an image with 35 x 29 pixels. Interestingly, the "mirror" very quickly responds to changes in the image, captured by the camera: in the second it can display up to 15 frames.
And here is a video story about the work of the mirror. Pay attention to the constant noise of a motor. Mesmerizing ...