I just started building fled kites, but my fellow Grassroots Mapper Nathan Craig is already doing 3D topographic scans with them. He’s using AgiSoft’s PhotoScan, which is unfortunately not open source, and costs $179. But as he points out, you just feed it images and it makes a damned good 3D model.
Reed Arts Week
The talk and workshop went great. I was too busy to photograph the flights, but will get photos soon. Su Liu came up with a great double-layer heat seaming strategy for her tetrahedron balloon- it was fast and quick:
Reed Arts Week, RAW: Geographies
I’m proud to be participating in Reed’s Art Week. I’ll be giving a lecture and demonstration of aerospace in the arts and Grassroots Mapping tools on Saturday, March 5 @ Noon. Location is still TBA. At the Gray Campus Center room C. There will be complementary supplies and instructions for building your own solar hot air balloon.
Essentially this kit, minus the expensive stuff (wind speed meter, infrared thermometer).
Come for balloons, stay for Francis Alÿs
At 4pm Saturday there will be a showing of Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains, and other works. Of course, you could watch his work on your computer, but get out and enjoy the cinema!
Francis Alÿs, “When Faith Moves Mountains” (2002). from Daily Serving on Vimeo.
Kite Balloon Development @ PLOTS
Follow the kite balloon working page over at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. There’s a lot of research in there that I’ve only now gotten on the web.
