Voshart's Digital Cube

Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious things that are, well, Rube Goldberg.  Daniel Voshart from Toronto has designed a solar time-telling cube from 59 stacked millboard plates. [See: Voshart Cube ] The result is a digital sundial, though not as universal as those patented Hines [USP 4,782.472], Scharstein [USP 5,590,093] or Kellogg [USP 05,596,553] but still, it is an interesting dial.

The cube creates light tunnels, an extension of an idea perhaps from Jiyeon Song’s “One Day Poem Pavilion” [http://people.artcenter.edu/~jsong5/thesis/].  Voshart’s cube gives the digital hours from 8am to 6pm [the animated illustration above shows the concept from 10am-2pm] but only for about 15 days centered around a specific date, in the case of the prototype, designed around the birthday of his father.  According to Voshart, it only works within 100 miles of the designated location, and even then, only for a limited number of days when the sun’s declination track across the sky matches the computed tunnel angles within the cube. Voshart commented on his website, “I gave myself a month [to design the cube] and then I had to stop, otherwise it would have continued for the whole summer. I have a plan to do a giant one for Burning Man next year.”

The statement that the cube works only within 100 miles is slightly incorrect.  The cube works within a latitudinal band of +/- 50 miles, but the cube vs clock time can be replicated within each time zone around the earth.

The cube, if designed correctly, accounts for the longitude offset from the center of the time zone (4 minutes of time per degree of longitude) and the solar variation of meridian passage called the “equation of time” that can be calculated for a father’s birthday or any other day of the year.  We shall assume that Vorshart was clever enough to include both these corrections for his father’s birthday thus creating a sun clock that for a brief two weeks will tell quite accurate clock time. For more, see http://www.voshart.com/SUN-CUBE-prototype