Random idea of the week: a disco floor made of scanners. I was walking down the street on Monday night and saw a scanner sitting on the street. Technology is tossed to the curb all the time in San Francisco, and lately I've been seeing more scanners (for a while it was managed switches) showing up the trash. This led me to think "Hmm, what could you do with a bunch of scanners?" and the idea of the scanner disco floor emerged.
Picture a floor with constantly moving back-and-forth lights, making long streaky scans of people's feet and ankles. The images could then be used in a video wall. Imagine if someone was breakdancing over this floor, or making snow angels. I think it would look great. There's already a whole camera-less scanner photography movement (as beautifully exemplified by Kevin Lyons' Floraphilia site). This could be the equivalent of scanner video.
I looked into it, and and the Linux scanner drivers can support up to 100 simultaneous scanners, which is a 10x10 grid and should be enough for a decent sized dance floor, or a corner of one. Of course people couldn't actually dance on the scanners themselves, but if you placed them directly under some hard plexi, maybe the depth of field would still be good enough to get decent results.
Leave it to Nadav to race right to the bottom...
Mike, when are we going to be building this?
And then you could set up a voyeur porn site with all the upskirt shots.
ooh nice idea.
it'll probably get realised in a music video first with the usual time stretch / squash as some velour spangled artist shuffles across it...