mekentosj.com | Modern Cubism

Modern Cubism: On June 29th we won the Apple Design Award in the category "Best Student Mac OS X Project" for our program 4Peaks. With the prize came a beautiful metal cube as trophy that glows when you touch it. While showing the cube to everyone, most people asked if we knew what was inside and how it worked. How did the cube notice that it was touched? Opening it up would be a simple solution of course, but we were afraid to break it. Still, curious as scientists can be, we thought of something more elegant to answer the burning questions. We contacted the people of the radiotherapy department in our hospital to see if they perhaps could take an X-ray of the cube, just like people had previously done with a Titanium PowerBook and iPod. Unfortunately they told us that they did not have an X-ray machine, we should contact the radio-diagnostic department for that. Instead however, they did have something else: a cone beam CT scan that would even allow 3D reconstruction!

Patient: Charlie Cube: This particular CT scanner is part of an ultra-modern linear accelerator of which there are only a few worldwide, and which together with the manufacturer has been actively developed in-house. The high-resolution CT image data is used to optimize irradiation protocols of cancer patients for better accuracy and effectivity in order to fully remove the tumor. In February this year, the NKI/AVL was the first hospital in the world to take this kind of machine in clinical use. Although it is very heavily used, luckily for us the people of the radiotherapy department offered to take a CT scan of our cube in between two patient sessions.

The machine is placed in the brand new hospital in a room with meters thick walls. There Jan-Jakob, the beam operator, positioned the cube in the middle of the beam after which we went down to the control-room from where the machine is controlled (see gallery). Taking the actual scan only required one 360° gantry rotation of the machine, and took no more than three minutes in which 600 X-ray images were recorded at a resolution of 512x512 pixels (see movie below). Next, these images were used to reconstruct the cube in 3D with a resolution of about 1mm cubic voxel size. With help of the open source medical image package OsiriX these data showed us exactly what is inside Apple's Design Award.
How does it work?: The cube is again a classical example of true Apple design, with eye for detail not only outside, but inside as well. Even though we found out that SparkFactorDesign is the company that really designed and fabricated the cube. Made out of one piece of solid metal, it is not difficult to see why the cube feels relatively heavy. The scan reveals a cylindrical cavity, drilled from below to just under the Apple logo. The bottom of the central cavity is separated from the battery compartment by a circuitry board containing surprisingly many electronic parts. Also from this logic board protrude to Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) that form the light source from the cube. The fact that these are placed relatively towards the bottom of the cube in combination with a plastic diffusion filter right below the Apple logo, gives the cube it distinct glow.

While we had been given the impression by some people at the WWDC that the cube was powered by some non-replaceable battery cell, we were pleasantly surprised to see that its energy source rather consists of simply four general AAA-type batteries. Now we can safely let as many people touch the cube as we want, once the batteries have been drained, we can just unscrew the bottom, remove the plastic battery support and replace the batteries for fresh ones.

Finally, the question with which it all began, how does it work? The CT scan shows that the bottom plate is electronically isolated from the rest of the cube. The potential difference between the bottom and the sides of the cube is measured by a probe in the bottom plate that is wired to the logic board. The cube notices the touch of a hand by sensing an electric contact between its sides and the bottom plate via the person touching it, a loop closed by the earth.
Inner Beauty: Move mouse over buttons to learn more, click to see movie...; Although very simple in nature, everyone who sees and touches Apple's famous cube reacts in the same way, they love it! But its design is not focussed on the outside only, it's as neatly constructed and well-thought inside as well, even though its designer probably had never thought that anyone would ever see it. After seeing these CT images one can conclude only one thing: true beauty comes from the inside.

4Peaks - For Peaks, Four Peaks

We received the Apple Design Award 2004 in the category "Best Mac OS X Student Project" for 4Peaks, a free program that helps researchers visualize their DNA sequence files. It reads and writes most commonly used file formats, and allows easy analysis and editing of sequence data. In addition it brings many cool features, like speech, BLAST searches and much more...

Learn More >>

How did they do that?

Visit our photo gallery and see how together with the people from the radiotherapy department we analyzed the working mechanism and inner design of Apple's famous cubic trophy.

Go to Gallery >>

Equipment Used

Data Acquisition

Elekta Synergy© SL20i linear accelerator with integrated cone beam CT scanner
Pentium 4 2.4Ghz PC Workstation
In-house developed high-speed 3D reconstruction software

Image Analysis

Apple PowerMac dual G5 2x2Ghz
Apple PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz
OsiriX open source medical imaging software
Adobe After Effect 6.0
Apple QuickTime 6.5 Pro

OsiriX

OsiriX is a next generation DICOM viewer Mac OS X with a beautiful and intuitive interface. It leverages the full power of the Mac OS X platform, offering many unique functions like QuickTimeVR export, iChat integration, and full support for the iPod as storage device. Most impressive of all, it is complete free and available as open source. Be sure to give it a try!

Visit OsiriX webpage >>

Wallpapers

To illustrate the beautiful design of Apple's Design Award, we have created a number of wallpapers. Available in a number of different sizes, these desktops can be downloaded for free. They match perfectly with those brand new Cinema Displays...

Go to Wallpapers >>

Sparking Design Factors

After opening the cube we found out that the real design and farbication of the cube was actually done by SparkFactorDesign. This young and extremely creative California based design company also happened to be deeply involved in the design of other Apple products like the iPod, the Mac Mini, and the Apple USB mouse.

Go to webpage >>

Acknowledgements

We would like to greatly thank the following people at the NKI/AVL radiotherapy department for generating the CT-scan:

Jan-Jakob Sonke PhD
Markus Wendling PhD
Marcel van Herk - Group leader

Van Herk Group >>