Because I love robotics, geometric patterns, and zoetropes, I decorated glass Christmas ornaments with special patterns that animate when rotated by certain speed and captured by a camera. The video is real; no computer graphic was used. Together with my colleagues from Czech Technical University in Prague Martin, Krištof, and Filip, we built a contraption to rotate and move the Christmas ornaments in an orchestrated fashion and let them dance.
The hardware consists of parts from two 3D printers Prusa i3 MK3. I designed patterns in science software MATLAB and decorated ornaments using a robot EggBot. When finishing the project we had to face problems like how to use a control board from a 3D printer for precise velocity control, or how to deal with wobbling ornaments. In the end, we filled ornaments with water to suppress wobbling. I do not know how many hours my colleagues and I spent on this, but I do know we finished shooting the video at 5 am in the morning entirely exhausted so instead of Merry Xmas we wrote Merry Xmass on the paper in the video and had to deal with it in post-processing :)
You can check my other videos with animated Easter eggs: Eggstatic (https://youtu.be/JfajQ4_hSN0) and Eggstatic 2 (https://youtu.be/rIgpqlrj-G0)
More info: aa4cc.dce.fel.cvut.cz
Christmas Ballance – stroboscopically animated Christmas ornaments
EggBot drawing the pattern
Testing of the generated pattern
Ornaments ready to be filmed
Behind the scenes
Mechanism that rotates and moves the ornaments
