oko optics
  • Home
  • Projects
  • Photography
  • About
PROJECTS
Picture
MINIATURE DOWEL SCULPTURES  (2023)
​
Wooden sculptures based on 2D digital information.

​
Picture
"FIBER OPTIC" LED MATRIX (2019)
​An LED matrix with fake fiber optic cables made of glue sticks.

​
Picture
DIGITAL MIRROR DEVICE (2023)
A scaled up version of a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), inspired by Ben Krasnow's Applied Science channel.

​
Picture
WOODEN DISC PLAYER (2021)
A giant version of a CD player with digital information stored on a wooden disc.

​

Picture
BUCKY GLOW (2018)
The Bucky Glow is a miniature interactive LED dodecahedron inspired by the giant LED dome I made in 2016. It is a tool for getting started with computer programming and electronics using Arduino.​
​Source files here.
​


Picture
LED ECLIPSE (2017)
The LED eclipse is an interactive instrument with LEDs, capacitive touch sensors, and a MIDI output all controlled with an Arduino Uno.

​
Picture
LASER SHEET GENERATOR (2017)
Lasers can be used to create incredible visual effects. In this project, I constructed a new type of laser display that is interactive and plays music. The device rotates two lasers to form two vortex-like sheets of light. I included distance sensors in the device so that the laser sheets and music can be manipulated by moving your hand towards them.
​


Picture
INTERACTIVE  LED  DOME (2016)
I created an interactive dome that lights up and plays music when you touch it. Each triangle can play a different note. The dome has also been programmed to play Pong and Simon.

​

Picture
LASER HARP (2015 - 2016)
I constructed an electronic instrument called a laser harp. Block the laser beam, play the note. The project was funded by Spectra, a student-led optics group at Washington University in Saint Louis.
​


Picture
​​TOKYO  BALLOON (2013 - 2015 )
Tokyo balloon is a wooden sculpture based on a digital image I took on my trip to Tokyo a few years ago.  The sculpture consists of 4230 dowel rods all cut according to the intensity of each pixel in the image (bright parts of the image correspond to tall dowel rods and dark spots correspond to short dowels).  

​
​
Picture

RIBBONS (2012)

Ribbons is a toothpick tower made of roughly 1700 toothpicks and a fourth of a bottle of Elmer's all-purpose glue.  The original plan was to build a tower resembling the Washington Monument.
​
​
Picture

THEREMIN (2010)

​After taking an electronics course at Pitt, I asked Dr. Everett Ramer if I could work on a summer electronics project.  With his permission I constructed a theremin using equipment in the lab during the summer of 2010.
Picture
DESKTOP GIGAPIXEL MICROSCOPE (2019)
A microscope with high resolution over a large field-of-view. The result is an image consisting of over one billion pixels.
Magazine, crochet, electronics


Picture
     DIFFRACTION GRATING       KALEIDOSCOPE (2019)
Kaleidoscope with rotating diffraction gratings that turn a light supply into moving color patterns.
​


Picture
CT & 3D SCANNER  (2018)
I constructed an optical CT scanner using an Arduino Nano and Nikon dSLR that can acquire 3D scans of semi-transparent objects. The scanner also can collect images for 3D scanning small objects through photogrammetry.
Scan archive here.
​

​
Picture
SENSORS TUTORIAL (2017)
I made tutorials on some of the most common sensors used for Arduino projects. The tutorials go over some of the pros and cons for using these sensors, and how to use lots of them for big electronics projects. 

​

Picture
SPACE-TIME  CAMERA (2017)
Instead of visualizing the universe as a 2D spatial projection onto a sensor or retina, you can also imagine viewing the universe along the time dimension. With this visualization of the universe, an image has a single space axis and a time axis as opposed to two spatial axes. I created a camera and code for creating space-time images that enable you to visualize multiple moments in time within a single picture.

​
Picture
COMPUTATIONAL PHOTO (2016)
Projects in computational photography including: 
gradient-domain fusion, texture synthesis and transfer, and video synopsis. Completed through Washington University's CS555 with Dr. Robert Pless.
​
​
Picture

​​MICROSCOPY (2015-2017)

I worked in a neuroimaging lab at Washington University in Saint Louis and built systems for imaging the brain. To test these systems, I collected images of lots of different things that weren't brains.
​ 
​
​
Picture

SOLAR WATER HEATERS (2011)

During 2011 in Pittsburgh, my friends Jeff, Pat, and I designed and constructed a low-cost solar water heating system made out of recycled plastic bottles.
​© Jon Bumstead 2023
  • Home
  • Projects
  • Photography
  • About