James Brown

A person holding a refurbished Nokia LCD screen with their thumb and forefinger; the image displayed is a cropped low resolution rendition of Michaelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel, and the word "PHONE" below

On the left, a cropped, grayscale copy of the previous image, serving as the reference for a pixel-perfect copy on the right

The finished 1-bit 84x48 recreated image

The recreated image, composited in such a way as to mimic an LCD screen

@ancient.bsky.social Thanks for the diversion ✏️👾

Ha! I could have given you the original, but that looks like more fun.

Oh cool, I still have my Lytro (the little cuboid one - such a beautiful object)

It's a Nokia LCD (like, literally from a phone - I bought 3 of them, and they're all dinged and scratched). Passive STN - I first tried with a round TFT I had, and the diffraction was horrible.

Presumably you could put a half red, half cyan filter in there and get anaglyph stereo with one lens.

Yes, much better than I expected

As my kid said, in what I believe was a compliment, you could take it through airport security no problem.

I made a deliberate decision not to put Bad Apple or Doom on this, YouTube commenters be damned.

But I'm going to put Doom on it, aren't I?

YouTube video by Ancient Digital Iris

"Animated Bokeh" has been on my whiteboard for a long time, and this is the result.

I thought it would just be for cheesy novelty effects, but it also does lightfield manipulation that was cooler than I expected.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_2...

I now have a channel on MakerTube: makertube.net/c/ancient/vi...

I've uploaded the build videos from my youtube channel. I'm curious to see what sort of life there is there.

Ooo

Ten years after his death, is David Bowie’s musical legacy at risk of fading from view? From the V&A to the Stranger Things finale, the pop icon still looms large – but with lower streaming figures than his peers, how many new listeners are discovering his music?

Ummm... no?

www.theguardian.com/music/2026/j...

Should have put a screen in it too.

Closeup of my hand holding a small circuit board. It’s black and round, with a square hole in the middle (the PCB I mean). There are some buttons around the edge, a USB connector, and a little Pi microcontroller.

Never stops being magic that you can just draw some lines and then something like this turns up.

A diagram from the datasheet of a small display module. It is absolutely infested with little arrows pointing at different places on the display, labelled either "Do" or "Don't". No more context is provided.

Forty names for kākā The bird with a big mouth. The bird who leads the flock. The bird who announces the day. The bird who sounds the alarm. The dark bird. The rare bird. The noble, silly, insomniac parrot we’re going to ...

Things kākā sound like:
“tape being torn off a box”
“a door opening for the first time in years”
“rapid, soft, fluid warbles”
“droplets falling into water, like a child blowing spit bubbles”
“a locomotive”

A richly rewarding parrot profile by @rebekahwhite.bsky.social
www.nzgeo.com/stories/fort...

screenshot from youtube studio: "A/B test report. They all performed well."

Like an end of term report from a doggy daycare.

Thank you!

YouTube video by Ancient Solid State Volumetric Display

A group at Columbia University built a display using this principle in 2006. The game they ran on it was Pac Man, which was a 25 year old game at the time. GTA 3 is now a 25 year old game, so I thought it would be neat to run that on mine. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrfB...

(asterisk)

James Brown's Latest 3D Displays Are Entirely Solid-State — And Yes, They Play Doom No more spinning LED matrices of death, these displays are inert glass blocks etched with internal point-clouds for external illumination.

James Brown is back with another three-dimensional volumetric display, only this time there are no terrifying rapidly-spinning LED arrays in sight thanks to a new and considerably quieter solid-state approach.

YouTube video by Ancient Solid State Volumetric Display

Here's the build video for the new volumetric display! Lots of swivelcam footage of it doing its thing.

youtu.be/wrfBjRp61iY

The process of making them.

I embedded a bunch of calibration targets in the block, assuming that step 1 would be manual align to those, and step 2 would be undistort or vision based point mapping. In fact step 1 works so well I haven't yet taken it further. There is some bleed, but the effort to reward of fixing it is high.

There are higher resolution projectors, and higher resolution laser etchers, so I think that would be the pragmatic way to go.
That said, when I was starting on this build one of the things I considered was rotating the block at low rpms, giving it 3D speckly grain.

You're just going to have to trust me that this is really 3D.

K9 glass

A Raspberry Pi Zero with a little camera attached, mounted in a small 3D printed tray, and looking out a hole in the front face.

This probably won't go in the build video because it gets a bit confusing. It's a camera arranged so it can be mounted in place of the projector, with the same form factor and attachment point. If everything is lined up properly, it sees the point cloud as a nice regular grid.

Yup

The resolution isn't great, but you can still play games on it.