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Eyewriter – Graffiti Research Lab

Jan 28th, 2010
by rich.
No comments yet

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

“Art is a tool of empowerment and social change, and I consider myself blessed to be able to create and use my work to promote health reform, bring awareness about ALS and help others.”

– Tony Quan, aka Tempt One

I’m always deeply interested in methods of graphically representing information. Graffiti Research Lab recently teamed up with Free Art and Technology (FAT) , and OpenFrameworks to bring that ability back to a friend who had become paralyzed from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

This is brilliant, touching, and how technology can be used to help. All of their development is being made available as Open Source information.

More information on the eyewriter project: here

Wham-O to release adult hoops.

Dec 5th, 2008
by rich.
1 comment

Last Spring, I started researching methods of producing lighter, stronger hoops. The old kids’ hoops from Wham-O were an obvious place to start. Could Wham-O make a better hoop than black polyethylene irrigation tubing? So I shot them an email out of curiosity asking if they had explored adult hoops. I received a very short email response stating that they had already begun manufacturing adult hoops which would be released in the spring of ’09.

Spring is quickly approaching. I’m very curious as to what a Wham-O adult hoop will be like. As far as I know, no one within the hooping community has seen the new product. Did they research size, weight, etc?

This could potentially have broad-reaching effects on our community. Since Wham-O has been pretty close-lipped about this, I can do nothing but speculate as to their strategy. Wham-O’s products are marketed to mainstream America, not to our little fanatic niche. My speculation is that they will be building low-end hoops that won’t satisfy “hoopers” but will provide an excuse to the rest of America to pick up an adult hoop. Will this be the catalyst for a second hoop craze?

Tube Experiments

Nov 11th, 2008
by rich.
16 comments

$150 invested in industrial tubes from McMaster-Carr.  Here are my results so far.

Polyethylene is the standard hoop tube.  Of all the tubes I’ve tried, in my opinion, it’s the best tube for most hoopers.  For those who hoop extremely fast, I think High Pressure Polyethylene (HPPE) is a better tube.  It’s slightly lighter and slighty stiffer.  Polyproplyne is also a great tube.  It’s even lighter than HPPE but springier and less stiff than HPPE.  It almost feels like kids hoop tube.  If you have questions, feel free to send me an email.

Attached you can find a table of the 9 tubes I’ve tried so far.  I’ve attached weight information so you can compare how heavy the tubing is.  I’ve used 120 in. lengths of tube as the comparative length for weight as my standard large is around 120 in. in circumference.

See a pdf of my tube table here.