William Ivy
William Ivy
William Ivy
Blog showcasing my work spanning electronics design, real-time animation, lasers, software design, electronic music, sound synthesis, photography, electron microscopy, motion capture, tabletop game design, AI art, and anything else I find interesting.
Latest Posts
The Idea Thanks to my dad’s good taste in music, my childhood had a killer soundtrack: classic rock, 70s folk music, and 80s new wave. At home or in the car, a constant rotation of The Beatles, Cream, Simon and Garfunkel, Talking Heads,...
The Idea Every nerd remembers the first time they saw a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a fly’s compound eyes, or the scales of a human hair: As a newly-graduated engineer, I stumbled on an eBay listing for a vintage AMRAY...
The Idea Pink Floyd’s “Back Catalogue” poster has a great composition: 1990s Sailor Moon has a great aesthetic: What if I combined the two? The Tools Stable Diffusion (sdxl_1.0, ComfyUI) IP-Adapter (sdxl_vit-h) ControlNet...
UPDATE: I now have a scanning electron microscope in my garage. The Idea I have been fascinated by electron microscopy since I was a child flipping through Popular Science and stumbling upon an image like this: I love using things for...
The Idea I was scrolling through my Instagram feed one morning and was presented with a series of Japanese citypop images: Beautiful images, but they are all of urban environments. What would landscape images look like in this style? The...
The Idea I have always loved the chaos of public-access television. Amateur camera work, rough greenscreen abuse, unscreened phone calls, a general sense of overwhelm and confusion. Let’s Paint TV is as close to perfect as the medium...
The Idea I have always found the text I see in my dreams to be interesting - it often looks like English, but isn’t. When I first started playing with Stable Diffusion, I noticed that the text it generates is very similar: A local art...
The Idea For many years my tabletop-gaming friends and I have made the pilgrimage to Indianapolis for Gen Con, North America’s biggest tabletop gaming convention. Over 70,000 nerds from all corners of the world gathering for 4 days of...
The Idea As a lifelong fan of Mad Max, I’ve got a soft spot for double rider leather jackets. I had never had an excuse to own one, until I saw Shih Wei Chieh’s Laser Jacket made for Japanese musician Kazuya Yoshii: Nothing could be...
The Idea Ridley Scott’s Alien was a life-changing experience for me, one of the most influential movies in my life. So when I finally saw James Cameron’s balls-out sequel Aliens you can imagine my reaction - the Alien Queen, the marine...
The Idea As often happens, I stumbled upon an interesting video: I knew about tesla coils, but had never seen one that could play music. I needed to know how it worked. The answer: by replacing the traditional spark gap (acting as a...
UPDATE: I have taken this project much further. The Idea Deep in COVID lockdown (December 2020), I stumbled upon a trending clip of a fascinating livestreamer named “CodeMiko”: I could not believe what I was seeing. Real-time motion...
The Idea In the fall of 1998 I played Fallout 2: It permanently altered the course of my life - I have been obsessed with radioactivity ever since. The ability to detect/see radioactive particles feels like a superpower. I had already...
The Idea At some point in everybody’s life, they get their first taste of infinity. Thanks to my dad carrying around an enormous VHS recorder on his shoulder in the 80s, I have footage of the moment I first saw it in a hall of mirrors at...
The Idea At some point in physics class I learned about ionizing radiation and found myself staring at this image: Somehow, people were able to take photos of radioactive particles over 100 years ago using this apparatus: Surely with...