Two Alien Abduction Lamp prototypes arrive at Oslo airport

Standing before me on my desk at home is a fully functional prototype of the Alien Abduction Lamp – complete with lights and alien pilots.

As the designer of this lamp, I am not going to begin to describe the feeling of holding a physical version of the lamp that I have been working with renderings and models of for the the last year and a half. 

I suppose that your first reaction is to want to see a picture or a video, but I am afraid that I can not show any images yet. This is after all a prototype, and as with all prototypes, the overall look is somewhat different from what a final product.

Please trust me for now when I say that the lamp looks fantastic! I am convinced that those of you who wanted a lamp after seeing the computer generated images will definitely want to own the real thing.

When will it be available?

I have had a long and productive meeting with the representative from the company in London who is in charge of sourcing this lamp from a highly experienced lamp factory in China. We were both very happy with how the lamps look, and we agreed on a relatively short list of amendments that need to be made before we can say it is finished.

Messages keep ticking in daily from abductionlamp.com to ask me if this lamp is available yet, so I know there are many people wondering how long it is going to be before we start shipping the lamp. Drew agrees with me that making the product as good as possible is more important than rushing to meet a specific date.

All I can say right now is that the heaviest work is behind us, and that we are rapidly ironing out the last minor issues. We are working to have the lamp ready as soon as possible, but we have not set a final deadline yet. I think you will agree with our priorities and be happy that we are making no compromises once you see the final product.

Limited edition

We are considering a special opportunity for all of you who have followed the lamp faithfully by sending messages at abductionlamp.com and by posting comments with your email here at herrklein.com. You will be the first to know, and we will invite all of you to be the first to get a chance to order a limited edition sample with a certificate that I will personally sign for you as soon as we get the lamp ready.

Kind regards,

Lasse

This morning, however, we were rickrolled. Not in the usual boring way where you are unknowingly taken to the original Rick Astley video. This one was far better simply by being well executed and by keeping the rickrolling in context:

I currently find myself redesigning an HD PVR service with a rather limited graphical specification for the on-screen display. The set-top box can only handle images with four bits per channel, giving a total of 4096 colors to work with. Not quite what one would expect from an HD set-top-box…

A company called Telegraphics have previously provided the 12bits filter for converting images from 8 bits/channel to 4 bits/channel, but they have not updated the filter for Photoshop CS3. The reason for this is probably very low demand for a filter like this. But if someone else out there are stuck with 4 bit images for some reason, you know how useful this filter can be for tuning images. If you are not one of them, you can safely stop reading now.

Adobe have now released a software development kit (Photoshop CS3 SDK) for creating add-ons to Photoshop, so instead of waiting for Telegraphics to upgrade their filter, I made my first plug-in with the CS3 SDK and Apple’s excellent Xcode.

My filter differs from Telegraphics’ filter by rounding off the color values rather than simply discarding the least significant bits. The result is that each color only changes by an average of 4 levels and not more than 8 levels, instead of being changed by an average of 8 levels and up to a total of 16 levels. This produces an image that is more close to the original. The Telegraphics filter changed the pixels in a way that corresponds to enhancing the contrast by applying an S-curve to the image. The formula I used is p=17*floor((p1+8)/17). Telegraphics used p=17*floor(p1/16).

I have called the filter Fourbits to refer to the number of bits per channel rather than something to do with “12 bits” because this kind of images can also be referred to as 16 bit images if they contain an alpha channel. 

The filter does not do any dithering since I have yet to see dithering look good in any application. I think it is better to create images that take the limitations of the color space into consideration. That basically means that you should avoid gradients as far as possible. The best results are acheived by creating images that contain only flat colors and textured surfaces. Applying a few percent noice before using fourbits reduces banding at the cost of graininess if you must have gradients. 

You can download the filter here: Fourbits.plugin.zip (mac only)

National Archives in the UK have released previously classified files on UFO sightings in Great Britain.

Some have already dismissed this release as a whitewash. I am inclined to agree with the skeptics on this one, since I have not found any reference to Elvis or cattle in the material..

I got the idea for the Alien Abduction Lamp late in the summer of 2006, and I finished designing the lamp during a holiday in Italy in May 2007. I published the 3D renderings on June 4. 2007; - with low expectations, and without any plans for taking the project beyond the concept stage.

High demand

Shortly after publishing the lamp, the response was overwhelming. International press and blog press wrote several articles about the lamp, and I got Stumbled, Dugg and Boing-Boing-ed. Messages were ticking in daily, and they continue to do so today. I have also been contacted by several manufacturers, distributors and resellers. The massive demand made me change my mind, and I started to feel a personal responsibility to take the Alien Abduction Lamp from concept to product.

Still just a concept?

I had a great time on a six month paternity leave with my little daughter this autumn. The paternity leave gave me less time to work on this and other projects than I had hoped for. In addition to this, the companies that I got in touch with last summer were all really busy. So a lot of time this autumn was spent waiting for communication in both directions between myself and the different companies.

The right path

There are several paths from idea to product, and I made the decision early on that I wanted to license the design to a company with a proven record of producing good products, rather than attempting to do it all myself. This will only give me a small percentage of the sales, but my biggest goal right now is to have the lamp made in the best quality possible. I do not have the time, the funds or the experience to go all the way by myself.

A UK based company

I have ended up selecting a quite small but very capable company based in the UK. They will be producing the lamp in China where they also have an office. I am licensing the design while keeping creative control, and we are now working closely together to make this the best product possible. Distribution and sales will be handled from their office in the UK.

Survey

There will probably be some differences between a 3D rendering based on a wild idea, and a real product based on the same drawings. Some design decisions and minor changes will have to be made, but I think it is very important that the final product becomes something that all the people who has shown a strong interest in the concept would still like and wish to own.

More than 1600 people had sent me an enthusiastic message from abductionlamp.com by the beginning of March. I found out that the best way to get the answers that I needed was to put together a small survey on the most important decisions that have to be made for the people that have expressed a wish to buy this lamp. I have summarised the survey, and I will publish the main findings here in the near future.

Next steps

The next step is to produce a working prototype. How long it will take from there until the lamp is ready for shipping is too early to say, but I hope that the lamp will be available some time during 2008 if everything goes well.

Stay tuned!

I will keep you informed on the progress if you send me a message with your email address from abductionlamp.com. I promise that you will only receive relevant messages from me.

Macheist has a limited time offer for a great bundle of 11 mac apps that I highly recommend. The bundle now includes CSSEdit that I have previously mentioned as the best tool for easy and elegant creation and editing of stylesheets.

It also includes AppZapper, and if you buy the bundle, you can use it to Zap slow and heavy applications like Dreamweaver from your harddrive.

CSSEdit and AppZapper together cost almost as much as the whole bundle, so the rest of the apps are a pure bonus. I have already become very fond of 1password, a small program that lets you securely share passwords across different browsers.

Please post a comment to let me know if something is not working as it should after changing to a new host.

And if you are a client and you are tired of “tiny-logo-loving designers”, you can try to order some Make My Logo Bigger Cream today!

• Information Aesthetics
  The beauty of visualisation and visual communication by Andrew Vande Moere.
• Daring Fireball
  Mac nerdery, etc. by John Gruber.
• Geisha Asobi Blog
  I love Japan and (almost) everything japanese, but I have yet to go there. This blog by Asobi Tsuchiya features beautiful, fun, weird and crazy japanese stuff.
• Technabob
  A blog for new gadgets, games, gizmos and other weird science by Paul Strauss.
• Future Perfect
  A blog by Jan Chipchase, a developer of future mobile services for Nokia.

Eirikso.com has been mentioned earlier, otherwise he would surely have been on the list. And I would like to second Eirik’s recommendation of Øyvind Solstad’s brilliantdays (and the Norwegian blog NRKbeta).If we put the rule about listing only non-community blogs aside, there are many others that I would recommend. And without repeating the ones already mentioned elsewhere, here are a few of the community blogs that I subscribe to:

• Core77 Blog
  Industrial design supersite Core77’s blog.
• Signal vs. Noise
  A blog about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more.
• Brand New
  Opinions on corporate and brand identity work.
• TechCrunch
  A weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.
• Gizmondo
  Gadgets!
• Inventorspot
  Serious fun for the inventor in all of us
• Authentic Boredom
  Mobile web design blog.

There are of course a lot of great blogs written in other languages than English, and these are some of my favorites:

• 2010
  Norwegian interaction design blog by Helge Tennø.
• Designerblog
  Italian graphical design blog.
• Motiongraphics
  Italian motion graphics blog.
• Macfeber
  Swedish Mac blog (the whole feber.se network is great).

Since no list is ever complete, I would be very happy for suggestions to other great blogs to add to my subscription list.

I think this idea is really great, but also quite disturbing. It should make you think one more time what you can do to personalize an image before taking it.

When I first heard about this camera at Siggraph, I thought the camera was a little more advanced, and that it contained a GPS allowing it to seek out an image taken from the location you are at, at more or less the same time of day in the past.