Technology

The Linear Zoetrope

Submedia and the medium of my art displays derive from a technology I conceived of. (Spodek et al, Apparatus for displaying images to viewers in motion, US Patents 6,564,486 B1, 6,718,666, and 6,731,370). I led and continue to lead its research and development through all stages. I also develop technology independently of Submedia; subways are only the start.

My one percent inspiration came in graduate school in 1996. I wondered if the zoetrope would work if it was straight instead of circular. Since all it consists of is slits and images, it seemed possible. Moving a display past a viewer seemed impractical, but moving viewers past a display would work. Subways move people past tunnel walls all the time.

My ninety nine percent perspiration followed in the next three years. Experiments and wrong turns in the early development taught me the basic principles of animation and projection. Eventually I developed the correct theory and practice by deriving the math and designing and testing many models.

A few words on each stage:

Early Development included

  • Thinking, learning, studying, deriving, and modeling
  • Wrong-turns
  • Deriving effects of the medium
    • Two simultaneous, independent effects of persistence of vision
    • Magnification
  • Understanding prior art, especially the Masstransiscope
  • 3D computer modeling and representation
  • The first working model made of balsa wood and construction paper

Intellectual Property: I began writing the patent when I had a working model, understood the prior art, and spoke with counsel at Fish & Neave. He later told me the patent application I wrote was the best he could imagine someone writing without formal training. (He wrote the claims.)

Prototyping working models began around 1999 and involved engineers at Parsons Brinckerhoff and professional sign makers across the country. Local manufacturers won out. Submedia, now incorporated, built a 120 foot, full-scale, fully operational prototype in an abandoned Hoboken warehouse. To view it, you drove past on a 10 mph golf cart.

Final Design: The final subway design was taking shape. Rigorous safety testing and detailed tunnel engineering specs determined the final design.

Transit systems and advertisers were showing strong interest. Atlanta's subway system, MARTA, signed with Submedia for a pilot display.

Coca-Cola signed to debut the medium based on a combination of Submedia's small-scale pedestrian model and full scale Hoboken prototype. During our first presentation to the Vice President of Consumer Communications, he loved the pedestrian display. He later told us he walked into our meeting to give us no more than one minute of his time.

Manufacture and Installation: Installing a display in Atlanta's subway tunnels in midsummer is grueling. I knew the technology best and my presence was required at several different stages, though Submedia's professional engineer managed the installation. Here is a picture of the first five boxes.

The boxes have sharp enough edges that when I saw that display is built of my own flesh and blood it's true.

Debut and Ongoing: The first commercial display of my design worked flawlessly on the first try, and has required no unscheduled maintenance since. It is nearly 1,000 feet long, 3 feet high, built of over 240 modular boxes.

The Atlanta unveiling with Coca-Cola's Dasani water saw national media coverage, including the entire Advertising column on the next day's New York Times and news coverage on all of Atlanta's news network broadcasts.

We built our second display in Philadelphia simultaneously with the one in Atlanta. The Philadelphia display was built on an unused station platform, giving us 24 hour access.

Designing and building Manhattan's first display saw the challenges of working with a 24 hour system, one of the country's oldest.

We stand at three displays to date, all operating with simple, routine maintenance. All built of my design (and flesh and blood).

The future: As Submedia licenses its medium we face the new tasks of distributing the technology abroad. My most recent challenge was rewriting the Pipeline -- the code that converts the advertiser's copy in whatever format into printer-ready files -- from scratch.


Free Software

Less of a focus, but equally important to me is Free Software, the intersection of digital technology and rights and freedom. I wrote a few pieces of software that I released under Gnu's General Public License.

One of my graduate school officemates told me he used it every day and said it was one of the most useful pieces of software he used.

It takes a column of numbers and creates a histogram. The output is convenient for the plotting package we used at the time. It's called histofy. I later created two other related programs: histstats, which returns the moments of a distribution, and a two dimensional histofy, called 2dhistofy. I hope others can use the programs. I'd love to hear if they do.

It's ironic the first Slashdot post about me was about Submedia and not software.

For short programs I prefer coding in perl. For larger projects I use c, c++, or whatever the program was originally written in if I didn't create it.

My goal with any design or engineering is to simplify and simplify the final product until it's so simple you can't understand where all the work went.

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