My good friend George Tsintzouras took me on a tour to the future yesterday. Seeing the tech on my 2-hour extended tour of Christie blew my frickin’ hair back.
Case in point above: this is my arm with vascular system projected in real-time. An infrared emitter/camera pair senses my veins and arteries, including the presence of blood, and then that data is rendered in visible light and projected on my arm. This aids in finding blood clots and identifying veins in the elderly and obese in a non-invasive manner. Whaaat?!
Regular readers know that there is not much in the world that distracts me from taking photos, but this fieldtrip had so much cool tech and I had so many questions, that photography took a back seat. Seriously, only *ten* photos!
The TL;DR: holy macaroni and thanks to George and Christie.
Update 2014-10-27: thanks to Audrey Heutzenroeder of the Christie Comms dept for the kind words about this post and correcting me on the official company name. It’s simply “Christie”, y’all. Don’t be thrown off by the hostname or history. –DW
George reflected in the tooling door of a bus-sized CNC mill at Christie’s HYPHEN rapid prototyping lab. Seriously-equipped shop.
Beautiful heat sinks for light-generating components of Christie tech. Y’all are well aware of my fetish for machined aluminum. These came out of HYPHEN’s shop. HYPHEN is a facet of Christie’s business, run by Mark Barfoot, that opens up these consulting and fabrication capabilities to the public as part of the business.
A small part of the literal showcase at Christie’s HYPHEN shop. Of particular interest to me is the incredible finish on these parts. More familiar with the Makerbot-level of consumer 3D printing, these parts demonstrate the other end of the rapid-prototype capability spectrum. Especially interesting to see how multiple materials can be integrated in printing a single output. HYPHEN emerged a couple of years ago and I didn’t delve into it too much as I am of more modestly-budgeted maker means, but this tour has me thinking I need to better understand that quality/cost proposition.
Lasers! Well, laser projectors, to be exact. This is a rack of lasers that feed a lot of very bright light via fibre to an actual projector where the projection optics live. This lets you relocate the heat and noise of a projector and takes you to a whole other level of brightness. It also makes for some hella-cool photography.
I had a lot of questions about modern display/projection tech, and George with his background in physics and ninja-like drawing skills answered them all.
This may be a new photo-fetish: light refraction in optics.
A DLP chip, perched on its heatsink. So many tiny MEMS mirrors that either reflect light through optics for projection or send it to the light dump. That’s why you get those beautiful blacks with DLP.
Hey, massive thanks for the tour, George. I only thought I was a Christie fan last week and now I’m buying the t-shirt and spreading the word. Let’s wrap up this post with…
one more look at the future.
On Wellington Street at Christie, this is Kitchener.
DW