Pyramidal holographics have become popular fast, with crowdfunding projects offering you ways to get into the game for just hundreds of dollars, but here is a way to put together your own small-scale version effectively for free.

Required tools: a smartphone, compact disc case, graph paper, pen, scissors, knife, tape or superglue. Basically, you cut a partial pyramid from the clear material, fasten it together, set it on your phone, and load up a video that turns those surfaces into four-way reflectors simulating the visual experience of objects moving in midair.

Critics will argue that this is not a true hologram and that is absolutely true, but the effect is nonetheless extremely compelling, and you can use it to animate not just the examples above but basically anything you want as well. The next step: scale things up and turn a television or computer screen into your base and buy a larger surface for the reflection.

Or, for additional easy fun, try this hand-drawn hologram tutorial (above) – it won’t be quite as visually complex or impressive, but it is still a neat trick to show friends or kids.

The post DIY Holograms: Hack a Phone & CD Case to Make 3D Videos first appeared on Gajitz.

Drawing with a pen and paper is hard enough (unless you count those little hearts with smiley faces that we put on all of our memos), but drawing with nothing but sound just seems crazy. Jerobeam Fenderson accomplished a surprisingly awesome work of art using nothing more than sound waves and an old analog Tektronix oscilloscope.

Fenderson uses two channels from his audio interface – left and right – to create waveforms, otherwise known as sounds. He feeds the sounds into his oscilloscope, where one channel causes horizontal deflection and the other causes vertical deflection. Using some math and seriously impressive skills, he turns the sounds into pictures. Dancing pictures. Of mushrooms.

As can probably be expected, Fenderson has received plenty of emails telling him that his awesome project must be faked. However, he offers up complete details as well as a WAV file for other people to try it out. He hasn’t yet drawn an oscilloscope on mushrooms, which is apparently another frequently asked question on his site, but welcomes pictures from anyone who does manage it.

The post Dancing Mushroom Animation Drawn Entirely With Sound first appeared on Gajitz.

Put on your headphones, sit back, and prepare to watch one of the trippiest math-related videos you’ll ever see. Created by French dub techno musician and fractal artist Alexandre Lehmann (who also goes by Ricardo Montalban or Zzzzra), “Overstepping Artifacts” is a truly bizarre journey. It takes the viewer through an otherworldly landscape that is part geometry, part biology, part steampunk architecture, and all very mesmerizing to watch.

The short video was created using fractal-creating software that accompanies Lehmann’s own music. The fractal shapes shift and change as though alive, constantly taking on new shapes. At times they seem alive. At other times, they seem like hostile parts of alien worlds.

The Overstepping Artifacts video is part of Lehmann’s ongoing Musicians with Guns series. Music is his main passion; 3D fractal art is a tangential interest but happens to dovetail nicely with the unique sounds of his original music pieces when they are played together. You can check out more of his work on his SoundCloud page.

The post Fractal-astic Voyage: Odd Art of Morphing Fractal Shapes first appeared on Gajitz.

Sea life is fascinating, but we rarely get to see the incredibly slow-moving life of coral, sponges, underwater fungi and other seemingly motionless creatures. Daniel Stoupin, a University of Queensland PhD student, wanted to raise global awareness of environmental threats to marine life, and he accomplished this in a shockingly beautiful way.

Using time-lapse photography, Stoupin shot more than 150,000 underwater photographs. He then turned these photos into a mesmerizing, hypnotic video that speeds up the pace of these underwater creatures to a pace that we fast-moving humans can relate to. The result is simply some of the most beautiful images we’ve ever seen of underwater life. Stoupin explains his goals and the feeling behind the clip on his blog.

This creatures in this clip seem utterly unearthly, as though Stoupin was somehow able to film alien life blossoming and moving. As creatures with relatively short lifespans, we humans tend to view slow-moving organisms as non-living. Stoupin points out that, at this time-lapse pace, humans could watch mountains rise and fall. Our own lives are simply a moment in the lives of these exceptionally slow-moving creatures. This incredible video makes it possible for us to see a world that is typically hidden from us due both to location and time.

The post Incredible Time Lapse Video Shows Hidden Underwater Lives first appeared on Gajitz.

According to a YouTube video from fantastic science goofballs AsapScience, music is “the combination of audio frequencies and intricate patterns floating through the air and clashing in your ear.” This is the first step in a distilled, yet entertaining, explanation of why music makes us happy.

“The Scientific Power of Music” uses everyday objects, sketches and animation to inform the viewer of the neurological links between music and mood. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter behind the positive feelings music gives us and is released when an enjoyable tune is heard. The brain actively seeks these relationships, seeing them as a necessary function through the reward factor – the same cognition behind drug use. Like its subject, this video is easy on your mind.

The post Quirky Animation Explains Why Music Makes Humans Happy first appeared on Gajitz.