A summer intern and a Libraries staff member provide support for cutting-edge technology designed to show “the colors between the colors” on screens of the future
Two Baylor professors – joined by professionals in film and video production, NASA scientists and players from the world of industry like Kodak – dreamed up a plan to expand how moviegoers perceive colors on screen, and the Baylor Libraries are pleased to help along the way. Thanks to the Moody Makerspace team, inexpensive materials, and the laser cutter, they were able to create a more convincing presentation of the effectiveness of their technology.
When Corey Carbonara and Michael Korpi began their work into expanding the palette of colors that can be displayed on screens, they knew they would face technical hurdles along the way. As their work moved from the drawing room to the prototyping phase – a process detailed in this article from Baylor’s Derek Smith – the system, which became known as 6P (for the six primary colors involved in the process) faced a new challenge: how to make its complex system understandable and demonstrable to non-scientists and potential financial backers.
In a fairly common occurrence on the Garden Level of Moody Memorial Library, Dr. Korpi was hanging around the Libraries’ Makerspace, brainstorming with Andrew Telep, assistant director of the Experiential Learning Commons. Korpi had a rough idea for a way to demonstrate the new process using a standard projector and a series of colored gel pockets within a custom-fabricated filter.
“Dr. Korpi was talking to me about how to show people how the process worked, and from our discussions I came up with a rough sketch on a whiteboard, which led to an example using Excel that included measurement and spacing,” Telep said. It was enough to pass along to Ryan Feller, the Makerspace summer intern and a senior Studio Art major from Bruceville, Texas.
Feller took the initial Excel document, converted it to a vector file in Adobe Illustrator, and created the first “sacrificial prototype” using scrap material from the Makerspace. A series of revisions later, and the final true prototype was ready, only seven days after the initial idea came from Korpi and Telep’s conversation.
Senior Studio Art major Ryan Feller poses with the various sketches and iterative prototypes of the gel filter holders he produced using the Libraries’ Makerspace
Korpi was pleased with the filter prototype and now plans to use it in presentations and demos of the 6P process for people who may become partners in the technology, which allows viewers to see “the colors between the colors” that are missed using traditional RGB color systems. Those presentations could include high-level capital investors, business partners, or film industry insiders.
“We consulted with Raymond Curtice, the engineering manager at the BRIC, who’s been involved in the 6P project along the way,” Telep said. “It represents another step in a growing relationship between the Libraries, the Lab to Market Collaborative (L2M) and the prototyping community in Waco. It’s another example of how we’re working to support R1-Tier1 research in the Libraries and providing crucial services to researchers and entrepreneurs on campus.”
For more information on the Makerspace at Moody Memorial Library, visit baylor.edu/library/makerspace.