Vacuuming Crap Off the Floor Never Looked This Gorgeous (PHOTOS)

A friend of mine got a Roomba just for the hell of it, and found it made a perfect toddler babysitter: his 3-year-old would follow the damn thing around the house, chirping, “Woomba! Woomba!” as if it were his beloved pet. Myself, I never found the things to be all that useful as a cleaning device -- by the time I finish de-cluttering the floor, I may as well vacuum the place myself.
 
But a group of German industrial-design students saw an amazing potential in the Roomba: they attached lights to the automatically-piloted vacuum cleaners, and took long-exposure photographs of their journeys. The results? Gorgeous, Spirograph-like images of light sculptures.
 
Here’s how they did it. Don’t you wish your housecleaning left such a cool image?

First, the Roombas were fitted with lights.

This is how they looked with the lights off, photographed with a normal exposure. Already very cool!

For one shot, they used boxes as obstacles -- it's all too easy to interrupt a Roomba's flow, alas.
 
 

How cool is that?! An overhead view:
 

The possibilities are apparently endless: 

 Just for kicks, I did one in my house, of me doing my usual job of vacuuming:

 
Ha ha ha, get it? I'm a horrible housekeeper! Go ahead, yell at me in the comments. And go look at the Roomba Art pool on Flickr for a seemingly endless display of cool art like this.

What do you think your vacuuming would look like from this angle? How do you like these pics? Tell us in the comments! 

All images via IBRoomba/Flickr, except the last one, which was a joke.