Another thing that I didn’t know was a thing. People who like to drop through big waterfalls, like Dane Jackson does in this video on the 60-foot La Tomata waterfall in central Veracruz, Mexico. And there’s more, like the 189-foot drop a reader posted below.
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I’m one of those horrible humans who take nature for granted and recharge myself through indoor fluorescent lighting. I like walking city streets, I like going into city bars and I like eating city food. Feeling tires screech, hearing sirens wail, coming across unexplainable damp spots, that’s all what I’m used to. But then I get a little taste of nature (through a Vimeo video on a computer indoors, no less) and wonder if I’m missing out on a whole magical part of the world. I probably am. You might be too.
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The scenes of Pandora in Avatar are still some of the most impressive naturalistic CGI worlds to ever grace the screen. Between the floating islands, the greenery, the waterfalls, and the exotic flora and fauna, it was really a visual spectacle. So when I saw that somebody had attempted to create the lush world of Pandora in their aquarium, I didn’t know if it could be done.
What you’re looking at here is an incredible recreation of the world of Pandora – inside a fish tank. It was created by a DIYer in China, and it replicates the lush green feel of the planet, albeit underwater.
Yeah, the plants look a little like floating broccoli, but the most impressive part of the tiny world is the waterfall effect – which I had no idea you could do underwater. Basically, it’s done with very fine sand being pumped into a trough and recirculated back to the top after it falls. Neat. Here’s a diagram which gives you an idea of how it works:
You can see more info on how to build underwater waterfalls here, but the site is in Chinese, so you’ll want to enable translation. Personally, I’d like it translated into Na’vi.
When I was a kid, I always found waterfalls mesmerizing. There’s just something about the massiveness of the whole thing that my kid brain just couldn’t fully process. Mesh that concept with a swing set and you’ve got yourself the object of many people’s childhood fantasies.
The Waterfall Swing is a collaborative installation by Mike O’Toole, Andrew Ratcliff, Ian Charnas and Andrew Witte. Its primary component are mechanical waterjets and solenoids that showered a plane of falling droplets towards the path of the one who’s on the swing.
The cool thing is that the curtain of water parts in the middle whenever the person on the swing, well, swings past it.
The swing debuted at the 2011 World Maker Faire. If you think you’ve got what it takes, you can learn how to build your own Waterfall Swing by checking out this link.
[via Colossal]
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