The United Colors Of The Brick

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Sep 9, 2016 in Culture, Design, LEGO | 0 comments

Looks like I am in the t-shirt design fever. Here is my latest creation: The United Colors Of The Brick. Please vote for it so that it does get printed. This design is a homage to Benetton and the LEGO Color Palette.

The curious case of LEGO colors

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Sep 9, 2016 in LEGO | 3 comments

LEGO’s color’s palette continues to be mystery to LEGO fans. The Bricks Magazine (#14) dedicated several articles to the topic and several AFOLs had a go at cataloging and understanding the LEGO color spectrum. New Elementary wrote a good post and several collectors attempted to find at least one brick of every LEGO color (Ryan Howerter, Jeremy Moody). LEGO itself seemed to have published its palette in 2010 and 2016. The LEGO Digital Designer also comes with its own color palette:

When you play the game of bricks, you win or you die!

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Sep 3, 2016 in LEGO | 0 comments

Please consider voting for my t-shirt design on Threadless.

Summer Research Scholarship Available in Human-Robot Interaction

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Sep 1, 2016 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

We have a summer research scholarship available for a University of Canterbury student. Check out the project description and please consider applying.

Problem with flickering pixels on Philips BDM4350UC/75

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Aug 19, 2016 in Documentation, Uncategorized | 0 comments

I enjoyed the large 43″ Philips BDM4350UC/75 for two weeks now and the screen size is just wonderful. It is just like to large monitors in one. I discovered to problems, one just a bit annoying and another rather big issue.

The smaller issue is related to the power saving function. When I ran the all black screen saver on my Mac Pro, the screen seems to go into its own sleep mode of which it does barely ever awake. Sometimes I could bring up the OSD and this would bring the screen back to life. I got used to switching the screen off with its own power switch and turn it back on in the morning. This might not be such a bad idea anyway.

The bigger issue is the display of certain colors, or the lack there of. When I want to show light grays, such as RGB 193,187,194 I get vertical lines of flickering pixels. I took a photo of the screen to demonstrate the effect. We visited the dealer and tried the same color/image on their showcase model with the same result. There seems to be an issue with this Philips display. Be aware!

Quincunx LEGO GBC Module (Galton Board)

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Jul 2, 2016 in Featured, LEGO, Research | 0 comments

Today I would like to show you my latest GBC module, a Quincunx also known as a Galton Board, named after its inventor Sir Francis Galton who used it to demonstrate the central limit theorem in 1894. The balls are being transported up with a conveyer belt and a light sensor counts how many balls have passed. The balls then roll down the board and at each peg they can either bounce left or right. After the last peg the ball is caught in a repository. Once 100 balls made their way down, the gate opens and releases all the balls. Probably no GBC module could deal with 100 balls at a time, so I queued them up and deliver them one at a time.

LEGO bans large weapons from their Ideas Process

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Jun 22, 2016 in LEGO, Research | 0 comments

I am not sure if our study had any influence on this, but the LEGO company just updated their LEGO Ideas Policy and they now explicitly exclude submissions of large or human-scale weapons or weapon replicas of any kind, including swords, knives, guns, sci-fi or fantasy blasters, etc. This is certainly a step in the right direction.