Intellectual Ventures Lab

On September 4th, 1888, 122 years ago, George Eastman applied for a camera patent. It wasn’t the first camera, but it was the first portable film camera.

George’s interest with cameras had first ignited when he planned to take a camera on vacation to Europe. He ended up canceling the trip, but he became obsessed with photography. It was such a hassle to take a picture with the glass plates and wet chemicals and so he was a banker by day and chemical experimenter at night spending all his time after work scheming up a way to make the camera portable. He started experimenting with taking photos on paper that had been painted with emulsion and later he got the combination right by putting photos on cellulose which allowed him to easily roll the film up for storage and development later

In his patent he refers to it as a “detective camera.” I can only imagine that it’s because a detective would be the type of person who would need a portable camera. The way it worked is you would take 100 pictures and send it to Kodak for processing and they would send you back 100 pictures and a new roll of film.

Even though he had a patent the roll film camera, he chose to focus on creating film. Because he created film for every camera that came out, camera manufacturers became his business partners. Sometimes the greatest innovations aren’t the “big ideas” but in finding a way to apply the big ideas in life. You don’t always need to find new big ideas to innovate, you can enter a space and explore the world that new big ideas open up. George Eastman continued to innovate until he retired and became one of the big philanthropists of the time.

It doesn’t stop there, In my research, I learned that Steven Sasson is credited with the invention of the digital camera in 1975 while working at Kodak. It’s cool to think that the folks who brought the camera and put it in the hands of ordinary people innovated into the digital space!

Learn more about George Eastman on the Kodak site and on Wikipedia.

Lots of people are inspired by inventions, but they rarely get a chance to be inspired by the inventors directly.  This is largely because they are out of view, sequestered in a basement finicking with soldering irons and zip ties.  Les Paul was a prolific inventor who has inspired nearly everyone indirectly, and a lot of people directly.  His inventions have probably had the biggest impact on the sound of popular music over your lifetime.

Les Paul invented the solid body electric guitar, multi-track recording, & tape delay.  He died one year ago today.

Here is a wonderful interview by NPR from 1992.

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is a process of suspending tiny tracer particles in the air and illuminating them with a laser sheet plane. The process is used to visualize and measure the movement of fluids. In this case the fluid is air, which is being displaced and agitated by water. Notice the airflow in the wake of falling droplets and along the borders of the subsequent splashes.

Download the HD vesion

Ever need to keep your hot and cold liquids in the same cup, but don’t want them to mix until they hit your mouth? Well,we’ve got just the thing.

We built a solid acrylic divider that can be used to seal two sides of a cup and then be removed when you need it to be. The design process starts with a simple photograph of the cup and inserting it into SolidWorks, where a spine was drawn along the inner surface of the cup.

The shape is then cut out with the laser cutter and silicone RTV (a sealant) applied to the edges. A thin layer of wax paper was then attached to the outer edges and the divider inserted and allowed to set to the exact shape of the cup.

Lets see it in action!

Even though the left side looks red, it is actually due to the reflection of the right side….trust me on this.

If you’re just stopping there, you may want to make a divider with a lower profile  so that you can more easily drink from the cup.  However, we were exploring a process developed by The Fat Duck for a drink called Hot & Iced Tea.  By varying the viscosity on each side with a  thickener, the divider can then be removed.  The left side remains cold and the right side remains hot.  The same technique can also be used for drinks with different textures (fizzy/still) or different colors.  Can you imagine the possibilities?  If you have a great drink idea to share, post it in the comments below.

We hope you had a great 4th of July weekend! What better way to celebrate than with fireworks and a high-speed camera.

Watch closely in the beginning of the video. You can see smoke from the firecracker rising to create gray bubbles on the water’s surface. Later, during the explosion, notice the little streamers of water which shoot up from where the bubbles were. 3ric Johanson explains that when the explosion’s shock wave hits the smoke bubbles, it causes those bubbles to burst and send up the streamers.

filmed at Hackerbot Labs

For those of us who were unable to attend the TED conference back in February (my couch cushions just couldn’t quite turn up the $6,000 price of admission), we are in luck!   Today, Nathan Myhrvold’s talk was released for the world to see.  Check out our founder highlighting several of our malaria projects, along with cameo appearances by 3ric Johanson and Pablos Holman.

Aahhhh, those mosquitoes must have laid a quablillion eggs in Sparky’s water dish on the back porch.

Um…are you sure that you counted correctly?

What we really need is a systematic, and preferably automated, method of counting those minute, black specks, otherwise known as mosquito eggs.  In the work being done over in the insectary, egg counts are need to determine hatch rates.  This is important for understanding the health of a new generation, as well as the previous generation that produced them.  It can also provide insight into the environmental conditions necessary to for a mosquito population to thrive…or not thrive, depending on your objective.

Fig. 1 Answer: Approximately 1149 mosquito eggs if I counted it correctly

In a perfect world, I could stop by the local egg counting store to pick up a dipteran clutch quantifier.  However, until we see that day, we will have to find our own solutions by more creative means.

Of course specialized and therefore very expensive software exists, but I just wanted a quick and dirty (i.e. fast and free) way to solve the problem.  What I’ve laid out is a first attempt, certainly with room for improvement.

It’s probably safe to say that very few of you are breeding mosquitoes at home, so try out this method to count objects in other types of photos:  a huge flock of birds, stars in the sky, your marble collection, the dots make up that stippled portrait of your great-aunt Joanne.

How does it work for you?  Do you have any advice or suggestions?  Drop a comment and let us know.

The tutorial and more on the project can be found after the break.
Read more…

Hey, don’t look so deflated! The warm weather is fast approaching, when the time will be ripe for instigating water fights. Once again we have pulled out the Phantom high-speed camera, this time to examine how liquids behave in a busting water balloon.

High-speed video…love it;
fire…yes please;
breathing…hope I never have to stop!

Put them together and what have you got?  Quite a mesmerizing stunt.  Jeff has been slowed down to roughly 1/50 the original speed using the Vision Research Phantom V12.1 high-speed camera.

You can image that preparing a TED talk is no small task. However, a demonstration as ambitious and technical as shooting mosquitoes with lasers proved to be quite a feat.

Between enhancing and cleaning up the software, assembling and mounting all the components, and just making sure everything looked nice and polished, we had a half dozen people occupied for over a month. During the last minute scrabble, some valuable lessons were learned. First, when the shipping company delivers the wrong crate to TED, effectively losing the world’s only Photonic Fence, it helps not to panic. Also, we now know that hotel water glasses are great places to grow extra mosquitoes when you’re running low.

Getting ready for TED was a lot of work, but nevertheless fun and surreal. We are excited about the enthusiastic response following Nathan’s talk, and can’t wait to share our next big idea with you.