Who doesn’t want a holographic Death Star sitting on the mantle at home? A group at the University of Leeds in the UK could make your dreams come true, as long as you don’t mind the requirements: a plastic enclosure containing a ring of LEDs spinning at 300rpm, a Raspberry Pi and uh, electricity.
Called the “POV Globe”, the device is the result of hard work done by a team of five from university’s School of Electronic & Electrical Engineering. A full explanation of how the globe functions can be found on the project’s blog, but essentially it uses fast-moving lights to create a persistent image, with the lights shifting colours to form a picture our brains can interpret.
In the photo to the right, you can see the globe in its idle state, where the LEDs and the Raspberry Pi are visible. In order to make the device work, the team had to build their own HDMI decoder, which plugs into the Pi.
You can check out the globe in action below. Sadly, it’ll need to spin faster (from what I can tell) to create the best experience… for now, it’s a bit vomit-inducing if you stare at it long enough.
Images and video: POV Globe