I got sort of obsessed with the idea of representing a three dimensional, digital object as a sculpture. The video sphere is my attempt at gesturing towards it. Twelve 2.8″ LCD screens sit on the vertices of an icosahedron, every one facing inward at a common center. Each screen shows what a virtual camera at exactly that position would see, looking at a virtual object floating in the middle. As you circle the sculpture, whichever screen you’re facing is showing you the right perspective.
A real hologram would be continuous; this one has twelve samples. The illusion is strongest when you look roughly head-on at a screen, and the oblique angles in between show partial perspective. The goal is a sculpture that appears to hold an object inside it.
The whole pipeline: TouchDesigner on a Mac renders twelve 320×240 viewpoints, JPEG-encodes each one (roughly 4-10 KB a tile), and streams them over plain UDP on 2.4 GHz WiFi. Behind each screen is an ESP32-S3 that reassembles its fragments, decodes the JPEG, and pushes pixels to the panel over SPI at about 16 frames per second, while a broadcast sync packet keeps all twelve screens swapping in step. Everything structural is 3D-printed: a hub with thirteen holes, press-fit stems, and a snap-fit case for each screen with a battery and a power toggle inside.
The idea started with an entirely different object: the Mine Kafon, Massoud Hassani’s wind-powered landmine detonator, a ball of bamboo stems tipped with round plastic feet, designed to tumble across minefields ahead of the people who would otherwise walk there. A beautiful idea with a brutal job, and a form that stuck with me: dozens of stems radiating from a center, each ending in a disc. I thought it would be intriguing if the discs were screens, so you could move around the ball and get a different perspective on the same object sitting at its center.
The series
This post is the front door. The code is open source — firmware, CAD, and the TouchDesigner project. The build is documented in five posts and a closing summary:
- The Icosahedron Hub: designing the hub, stems, and pedestal in OpenSCAD, and the vertex math that aims thirteen holes.
- The Screen Enclosure: building the per-screen cases on YAPPgenerator_v3, written partly as the reference I wished existed.
- The Printed Parts: printing everything, and the clearance parameters that make the fits work.
- The TouchDesigner Camera Rig: the TouchDesigner side, from the rig to the sender to the calibration mode.
- The Screen Firmware: the ESP32-S3 firmware, including a two-core pipeline, a four-slot ring, and a tearing bug that was really a rate mismatch.
- The Whole System: all the numbers in one place, and what’s still left to do.
If you only read one, read the last one. If you’re here because you’re building something similar, start wherever your problem lives; each post stands alone.