3DAlienWorlds BLOG

Halloween Special #1: Crystal Ball Projection

Happy Halloween, everybody! This is a fun little Halloween prop I designed and printed, to decorate for an upcoming party. You might have seen it before described as a "Pepper's Ghost" effect, and most people DIY it from an old book etc, and I thought it might be good to make one for 3D printers.

So here's mine...



▲ This looks really cool in a dark room - see video below!

▲ You will need the printed pieces shown in this photo, which are available for free on Thingiverse:

  Crystal Ball on Thingiverse  

The book has a 160mm space available inside, which should fit most smartphones.

You will also need a crystal ball piece - I bought a plastic snow dome kit from Amazon for about $2 (Artec Snow Globe Kit 55370), which has a diameter of 78mm.

▲ The hole in the book cover is 53mm in diameter, which is what I needed for my snow globe dome, so please adjust the scale of all 3 pieces to fit the size of hole you need.

▲ The only other item you will need is a thin piece of clear plastic, cut into a circle and placed inside the crystal ball. I glued it at a 45 degree angle with a couple of dots of hot glue gun.

Download a suitable special effect video from YouTube, play it on loop on your smartphone, and you're done! Here's the MP4 link to the video file I used:

https://www.3dalienworlds.com/pages/EnergyBallLoop.mp4 (18MB)

Here's a video of the Crystal Ball in action....

Name
Comments
Enter Code