The bed arrived today just as we were sitting down to dinner. As soon as we were finished eating Wesley and I hauled the 100 pound box upstairs. Unlike a traditional mattress this one requires a bit of assembly. I set up our Canon SLR and connected it to the computer via the USB cable and included software to shoot a time lapse video of the whole process. I’d seen this page which offered some nice stills, but I’m really loving this whole time lapse thing.
The bed went together pretty quickly, even though as you’ll notice in the video we had to spin it around a couple of times to get the pieces to all line up. The green “thing” towards the front of the video is, as near as we can determine, some sort of body pillow. We weren’t expecting it, but it was in the box so it is ours now.
The frames are 10 seconds apart. The first video is compiled at 6 frames per second. So if my math is right, that means each second of video was one minute of real life. If you don’t have 39 seconds to spare, take a look at the second video. Same images only at 30 frames per second (or 5 minutes of real life to 1 second of film).
Right now I give the bed a rating of “Interesting”. We’ll have to see how it feels after a couple of nights. It is basically a couple of air mattresses with built in pumps (similar to the Aerobed) wrapped in some memory foam and zipped into what looks like a normal mattress cover. The kids dig it for sure. Up, down, click, blow, hiss. What’s not to love? Even as geeky and techy as I am, I must admit I never thought I’d own a bed that needed to be plugged in.
Oh! And it stinks to high heaven. It was manufactured on the 17th, the same day it shipped and it has that new petroleum product smell. We had the windows open as long as we could stand the cold. Hopefully this mellows out quick or we are going to have to go bunk with the kids.
Congratulations! Enjoy the new bed. I absolutely LOVED the time lapse. Way cool! You almost looked like the salt and pepper guys from the old skool Seasame Street.