Dancing anti-gravity plastic balls: happy!

Alan sez, "How to do 'happy' in a short film with microchips, soldering and... well, just watch."

"Happy" was the theme we were given by the organizers for this year's F5 Re:Play Fest, held in April in NYC, to create this edition's pieces, probably the hardest thing to convey in any artistic expression. After a good deal of introspection, and teaming up with awesome motion graphics artist Gerardo del Hierro, we decided that happy wasn't happy for Physalia unless pliers, microchips and a bit of soldering were involved, and with this idea we resolved to create the happiest machine Physalia has built to date.

F5 2011 RE:PLAY Film Festival. Inductance (Thanks, Alan!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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dancentury

Is that a job? If so where do I apply?
Anonymous

I’ll never play lotto again as long as I live. They know which numbers are played and now they can pick the winners. Somehow the winners are always from some outlying district and never in my community,
Anonymous

It does not matter if it is real or fake. What only matters is if you were entertained by it.
Muse

Yes this is fake, but it is still a delightful idea and brought a big smile to my face.
Stradivari

To whom it may concern: The video on the front page is not the same as the video in this story. It’s instead a video about some kind of deep sea octopus, which is somewhat confusing.
Anonymous

i want to work there :(((((
jeligula

I re-ran this to catch the finer points that everybody was talking about when I noticed that Vimeo does not allow you to mute all the way. Lame.
Snig

Anon@19 and Muse are correct, most other commenters are photoshopped. I can tell by the pixels.
Zadaz

I really wanted this to be real, but no such luck. (Which, honestly makes it a pretty bad pitch reel for a SFX company.) What did it for me was the lighting on the pulsing blob of balls. The lighting doesn’t really match and each ball has a ridiculous amount of rim lighting even though a) some of them should be in shadow and b) Nothing else in the scene shows rim lighting.)

(That, and mounting it to the ceiling with a steel chain. Turning it on would simply stick it to the ceiling.)

However it might be possible to do something interesting along these lines. To address a comment above, each ball could be powered by the magnetic field that’s holding it up.

Though really some rare earth magnets, a PWM magnet and the right kind of sensors could probably so what’s illustrated here.
AirPillo

I wish I could see more video of that in action, that’s such an awesome creation!
Mockiavelli

This is a great video, but it’s not exactly maker-stuff.
What we’re seeing is actually computer visual effects and good story editing.

Watching the montage of preparation set off my spider sense for fake business right away: the cartoonish giant magnet and seeing only one ball get some technology implanted in it. Then we see everyone watch the ball fountain, their gaze fixed in space like they don’t know where their attention is focused… If you google Physalia, they’re a 3D animation company.

Maybe it was obvious to everyone else that this is just a movie rather than a maker project, but I know it went through my whole office with people saying “can you believe they built that?!” No, I can’t.
- Anonymous
  
  Thanks for your comment, that explains a lot!
  
  And if you look at the footage of the “creation”, you can see that there is no shadow of the balls.
- Scissorman
  
  I wish I could disagree with you. That would mean this existed but I think it is fake also. Shame.
Anonymous

Hate to be a naysayer, but I’m pretty sure those balls are CG. Firstly, the graphics are a little off – the real balls are translucent, the floating ones are not. Secondly, there is suspiciously little interaction between people and floating balls. Third, with such a powerful electromagnet, it would be very difficult to operate computers recording equipment, and the tables and lamps and laptops would probably lift off and stick to the magnet. Lastly, I don’t think those little bread-boarded coils would have enough power to lift themselves including their own power-supply (a watch battery?)… but that does depend on the flux from the big magnet.
Bill Beaty

Put a neo magnet in each ball for crude lift, then add a bias coil for maglev; pcb & power supply. Perhaps remotely power them with a separate high-freq coil (or each ball would need a weighty battery.)

They’d have to remain far apart to keep the magnets from interacting. Either way, the lift magnet diameter needs to be MUCH larger than the lifting distance. Install 30ft magnet disk in the ceiling. But that ceiling magnet field doesn’t vary, therefore it needs no power supply, just use perm magnets, perhaps a $10K of 2″ neo magnets stuck to a big steel slab. Try it in a water tank with neutral buoyant spheres. Try it on the ISS.
Anonymous

Oh shut up all you cynics! THEY’RE MAGIC FLOATING MULTI-COLOURED BALLS! Embrace your inner child and playfulness, stop prattling on about pixels, and ENJOY THE MAGIC! :)
chip

Internet detectives to the rescue!
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/hak7d/this_is_fake_right_please_tell_me_this_is_fake_i/c1twpoe
Anonymous

Someone who said it’s fake – there’s a clear shadow of the balls lifting up @ 0:56 on the left side, on the ground. Sheesh.
kmoser

Why do the plastic balls need a microchip to get lifted by an electromagnet?
Chava

@kmoser the pretense is that the cards have a small electromagnet that gets turned on and off by a controller on the chip, thus making the balls go up when on and down when off.

I think this is awesome, because it’s now only a short time until someone builds one for real. Probably won’t be as smooth moving, but still awesome.
- ackpht
  
  It’ll be a long time before someone builds this for real, because the cards in each ball will need a potent power source in order to generate the magnetic field.
Anonymous

I thought something was up. The magnet coils didn’t look arranged as shown in my books on electromagnets. And turning on a magnet that powerful with your computers, glasses, jewellery within a few meters of it? And powering a “junk yard” type magnet with cable that thin & flexible?
Steve D

Yeah, it’s CGI. Physalia is an effects shop. Not entirely sure if it’s even possible. Maybe, with a small PCB loaded with a microcontoller, accelerometers and a non-ferrous electromagnet…
Anonymous

Also: If this was real, I don’t think the balls would keep floating in the area between the magnet and the box. They would either just stick to the magnet or stay on the ground.
mniejiki

As someone mentioned in another forum, look at the computer screen at 0:24 when the guy sitting at a desk has balls dumped on him. Clearly he’s editing the final video or making it in some 3d program.
Infinitude Tortoises

As they interject in England, Balls!