Hi guys, welcome back to Beals Science
Now this thing behind me is fantastic
this is an augmented reality sandbox. I've been working on this thing for a couple of months
And its about to blow your mind. I'm not even joking. Check this out!
Isn't this awesome?
I know it is hard to tell what it is right now but it is drawing
topographic lines on top of the sand so the Xbox 360 eyeball is looking at the
surface and it's projecting down on here and as I move the sand around it redraws
new topographic lines. You can even make it rain. This is super fine white
sand and it's highly reflective so when the light comes down it bounces off and
it looks like a projector screen only this projector screen is awesome because
it's interactive so look at this you can see the topography on the sand now if
you want to build one of these I've got complete instructions it's going to pop
up on the screen and also there's a link down in the description but what I'm
using here is a Kinect.
That Kinect is reading the sand and it requires a whole
lot of sand to make this happen in fact this is 250 pounds of play sand and when
I finally get this thing built and running this is exactly how I felt. This
was months of work now. What's this thing for well all those lines it's drawing
are topographic lines and what is topography it just shows the contour of
the land so you can see this is sea level at least that's what it's showing
and I'm building a mountain here so that's going up the mountain and each
one of these lines is a contour line it shows that we're going up in elevation
away from sea level so there's they're moving their way up to the top the
closed circles up there that represents the very very top of the mountain. Now as
we work our way down the other side of the mountain back down to sea level and
all the way down to the bottom of my fake little ocean here you're going to
see those contour lines moving down again all the way down to the bottom now
we haven't filled it up with water but you can, that's part of the coolness of
this thing. And you get to destroy. Everybody loves that! The goal in building
this was to engage young people with science and technology and these are my
kids this is one of the first times I turned it on. They had see me working on it
in the garage and setting it up but they never really understood what it was
until this moment 'This is the coolest thing ever!"
'This is crazy awesome!". But then they figured it out and within minutes this is what they
had made. Completely blew my mind. Now my students in high school. Once I got this
thing built I turned on I couldn't get him away from
it took away all the class time I loved every minute of it
and so did they. Pretty soon I had a steady stream of teachers coming into my room
because they heard about this sandbox thing and they wanted to play. 'Everybody
always tells me why don't you make it rain well now I can!' And then a film crew
showed up from the local CBS station they spent 20 minutes after the
interview playing, playing in the sand isn't that awesome? And remember I made
this for the little kids but everybody fell in love with it and then we decided
to do a little more experimenting like projecting landscapes on top of it and
building the sand of that landscape this is Nico, one of my students and he
decided to make the U.S. Now what about landforms like volcanoes and islands that
seems like that's what everybody wants to build his volcanoes and islands and
then destroy them. But it can model so many things the possibilities are
endless. Like a village of Monopoly houses on a floodplain and you make it
rain there's so many things you could do. I think one of the great things here is
this sort of interplay of Science and Technology and the possibilities for
what you could use educationally really are endless with this
you know we had a lot of stuff going on over here at Beals Science. We've got
some other great projects if you're thinking about it including a huge
cardboard planetarium that you can build. So stop on by, come over to BealsScience.com
and check it out! Thanks for watching the concept and program for this was
developed by the folks that UC Davis go check them out