We have now published the new website for The Alien Abduction Lamp, and we are showing a picture of a prototype for the first time! The picture shows the last prototype, and there will only be very small changes (if any) before production starts.

If you have been following the progress for this lamp since the start, you will notice that we have managed to produce a lamp that is very true to my original 3D renderings. The way from concept to prototype has gone very well, without having to compromise on any important details. The few changes that have been made from the renderings to the final products have been by will and by listening to your feedback in my little survey rather than by necessity. The most noticeable change is the removal of the ornaments and pattern to arrive at a more timeless and clean result. You probably also noticed that it has taken quite a while, but seeng the beautiful result, I think it has been worth the extra time.

The UFO itself is very solid and cast in metal with a beautiful black pearl finish (you can’t really see how nice the finish is in this otherwise great photo). The antenna functions as the on off switch, and it also has a third position for pulsing light. And of course it comes complete with glow-in-the-dark aliens, real fake grass and a poor removable bovine abductee!

The Alien Abduction Lamp. Photo by Tiger Global

Now, pull out your 3D glasses and head over to abductionlamp.com to take a look for yourself!

(Those of you who have sent me a message with your email from the old website do not need to send a new one now.)

Freshome were among the first to write about the Alien Abduction Lamp back in june 2007, and I have been following them since then. They have now included the Alien Abduction Lamp in their list of 40 of the most creative lamp designs ever. I recommend this article to get a look at the other lamps. I am very happy to see the Alien Abduction Lamp in such great company.

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

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!

I am happy to announce a project that I have been working on for a while now.

The Abduction Lamp is not meant to be a toy. It is supposed to be made in high quality from metal and glass. It is my hope that someone with a playful mind like yourself would want to have a lamp like this in their home.

How does it work?

A light source inside the UFO body lights up the windows and the cone shaped glass beam. The beam glass is frosted to diffuse the light enough to spread it in all directions.

A true UFO Lamp

I got the idea for the abduction lamp as I was driving past a lamp store one late evening and saw how the light fell from one of the lamps in the window. The idea stuck in my head, and I returned the day after and saw that it was a quite common lamp.

I have spent a while building and rendering it in Maya, and I will return with some of my experiences with the visualisation process in a future post.

A new theory on abduction

Visit abductionlamp.com for more images. You will also find my new theory on why aliens are busy abducting cows and people..

Update

The Alien Abduction Lamp is moving from concept to prototype.

I am attending this years Siggraph in San Diego in the beginning of August. It feels like ages since I last attended Siggraph in Los Angeles in 2005. I am especially looking forward to the papers, panels, emerging technologies and the exhibitions.

Last years focus was much on optimizing the technical platforms of the 3D packages and integration on 64 bit systems. I believe that this year will bring some exciting news in the 3D industry, building on the foundation that has been laid. I also believe that Maya 9.0 will be presented at Siggraph, with the full implementation of Nucleus for dynamic systems.

I have also signed up for Autodesk’s Siggraph MasterClasses to brush up on my Maya skills. If anyone reading this is interested, I have an extra copy of the 2005 Maya MasterClasses DVD to give away. It contains lots of great information and sample projects. The first to comment and ask for it gets it.

Eirik Solheim has posted some videos from the art gallery and emerging technologies from last year’s Siggraph in Boston at eirikso.com.

Update:

Another slight similarity:

CSS only

It did not take too much time or effort to get from blank theme to the current layout. Apart from a few minor changes and bug fixes in the template files, almost all the work was done in the style sheet and in Photoshop.

The right tool for the job

Everything went like a dream after I found the wonderful program CSSEdit 2.0. CSSEdit makes both Dreamweaver and the web developer plugin for Firefox look like amateur toys. It is a really elegant way of working with style sheets that gives full control and a preview that updates instantly. My only complaint after using CSSEdit is that it does not display element sizes, and that it should be possible to select elements in the editor from the preview window. Still, anyone doing web design on a Mac should check out this little gem. And anyone not working on a Mac should cry their hearts out.

Help and be helped

CSSEdit lets you view any web page side by side with its style sheet to see how it is made.

It also lets you edit the style sheet (locally of course) to see how the changes would look instantly. This is great for collaborative work – or for asking others for help with your own style sheet. They can do all the necessary changes in CSSEdit and send you the corrected style sheet when they are done.

Let me know…

Please leave me a comment if something is not right with this site after the update. The result that you see here is to be considered a starting point for future updates. I know that things might look a little strange in Internet Explorer below version 7.0 due to the poor way IE handles transparent PNG’s. I do not have many visitors using IE, but I will probably fix this some day and make a version of this theme available for download.

The following sites are worth checking out for the witty, beautiful and innovative works collected there. I have a couple of ideas that I hope to publish there myself when I get around to it:

NOTCOT.org

The Cool Hunter

Productdose

Please comment if you know of other quality sites like the above!

To publish or to protect

Like many others, I have a few ideas that I am constantly playing around with. And like many others I even think that some of these ideas may one day be materialized into releasable products. It appears that one should worry more about waiting too long before publishing an idea than about having the idea “stolen”.

My Concept Watch

Below is the first quick sketch that I made of watch concept back in 2002. It is hardly a beauty in this first rendering, but the point here is the concept itself. I have not done anything with it since then, so I guess I deserved what I had coming…

Research

A little research told me that the idea of presenting time in this fashion is nothing new. I found Mark Newson’s ingenious version of the same general concept. This is a wall mounted clock where tiny magnetic balls indicate the time.

Newson’s watch put me off the idea a little at first, but I still felt that my own concept added something to this because it was a wrist watch without any glass. The idea was that it should be made entirely out of metal. But I did not give up on the watch entirely, and I was planning on pursuing the idea after finishing a couple of other projects I am working on in my spare time.

Recent Events

I was quite disappointed to find this post the other day. It is basically the same thing, but obviously taken a lot further in the visualization process:

Preparing for the Future

Fortunately, this was not my favorite among my three concept watches. But this certainly makes me think. Ideas are volatile entities that pop up where you least expect them, and it is just a question of time before someone else comes up with a similar thought.

I would be very happy to hear some thoughts on this. Is it best to publish the idea and hope that nobody grabs it from you? Should the idea be patented first? Is it better to try to sell it as soon as possible?

I guess the answer to the above is whether one is doing it for fun, fame or fortune. But who says you can’t have them all