Today on a site of geeky photos from our past, Dork Year Book:

The laser class is back and it’s the first Saturday of the month for May, June, and July. This is the class to take to learn how to use an Epilog 35W laser to make your rapidly prototyped dreams come true.

The class covers safety issues, design parameters, and a short introduction to Inkscape, a free vector based editor. I really enjoy teaching this class because everyone in the class leaves with an object that they’ve designed and made. Acrylic and lasertime is included in the price of the class. This class is a portal into the world of acrylic awesomeness

Besides being a great class to teach, I really enjoy this class because I never know what ideas the students will come with and make a reality. Watching people make objects from their imagination is magic!

The class is $75 for the class I affectionately call, “Fire The Lazzzor!”

Update: If you want to really get into digital design, you could double up and take Edith’s Introduction to Illustrator class which will be taught earlier in the day in May. Her background is in fashion design and so that class is going to be a great introduction to doing the vector based world and everything you learn there is applicable to learning how to design for the laser.

Nick and Alicia worry that their ninja glove messages might get intercepted.

Back in December 2008, the awesome teaching team of Kate Hartman and Rob Faludi ran a workshop on Wireless Wearables. On May 3, they’re doing it again.

The workshop covers what wireless is and isn’t (”calling it wireless is about as accurate as calling it tomatoless”), how to choose materials for soft circuits, and common problems when configuring the XBee. The materials fee means you’ll walk home with your own LilyPad XBee board, an XBee radio, a battery pack, and whatever it is you’ve sewn it into.

Sign ups are open now: http://wirelesswearables.eventbrite.com/

For the past 8 months, I’ve been working with artist Pawel Wojtasik on a project called “Below Sea Level”, a panoramic video cyclorama art piece about New Orleans. It opened this past weekend at Mass MoCA, and I highly encourage you to visit!

Below Sea Level at Mass MoCA

I was particularly pleased that we managed to pull off this project for fraction of the budget that is usual. For 8 channel, high resolution, edge-blended cycloramas in a theater this size, a budget of $250,000 is typical.

Mass MoCA did it for a fraction of that price, without actually purchasing any commercial panoramic video solutions. The brilliant tech staff at the museum, led by Dante Birch, designed and built the projector platform below:

Projector array

I helped edit the footage generated by the Ladybug panoramic camera, as well as many other video sources, and wrote software to manage the distortion correction (for the curved screens) and playback from a single computer. I used the Max/MSP software environment for this. A key cost saving measure was to actually render distortion correction and edge blending into the footage, which saved having to do it in real-time on playback, and greatly simplified the projection system.

The soundtrack was composed and mixed 5.1 surround by Stephen Vitiello, and is played back on the same computer that handles the video playback.

I’ve written more about “Below Sea Level” on my website here, and also a couple of “making of” articles about the projection system and the panoramic video camera.

Check it out!

Rocketboom came by our hacker space and I gave them a tour!