Bill Fontana came to sit in on our Robotics Ecologies class last thursday. The different teams in the class presented their ideas, which we did with our greater project (we have now named it “Medusa”). Me Fontana seems to be generally interested in our work, althrough the feedback we obtained are generally worried about the timeframe that we have for constructing the project.
Seems that our team needs some future discussion about cutting down the scale of the project. More updates about the project coming up soon.
So after the filings project, we are separated into groups of 5 (2 music graduate students, 2 architecture students and me) to work on a greater semester project for the final show in May. Although not sure about what we are going to make, our team has an initial idea of making a small LED sphere contained in the middle of a space (we are talking about room size space) that interacts with the small LED sphere, in which the interaction between the two defines the space of the system. Such general idea, of course, would go through stages of painful elimination and refinery to evolve to a totally different project from the initial idea.
Currently this is the third week of development of the project, yet our idea has changed from a small sphere (agent) to having a series of agents arranged in a grid to be hung in the ceiling of a space, in which each agent are wired with a solenoid as well as wires to produce acoustic properties of the agent. Each agent would have a wire hanging down from the ceiling that contains a sensor. The sensor senses the prescense of humans as they move in the space, which would trigger and vary the acoustic properties of each agent.So here’s how it works for the system:
1. When there is no presence of any external factor in the space, the solenoid in each agent is set to hum/make noises.
2. A person walks into the space under the grid of agents. As they walk through the space, their movements and bodies would trigger the sensor, which in turns sends a signal to the solenoid to stop the solenoid. The agent right above would stop the humming sound.
3. The stopping of the humming sound of one agent would trigger its immediate neighboring agents to stop humming. Hence the nine agents above and near the person in the space stops sounding
.4. As the person moves away from the sensor, the solenoid would sound again and the agent and its neighbors would start to sound again.
5. As the person progresses in the system, he/she would cause a series of off and ons of the humming sounds of the agents. Hence the movement of the person defines the sound of the space.
In this project, I am mainly working on the visuals of the project. My idea is to construct a visual system which projects and shows the states of the agents (being on/off). The visual system will likely to be an animation that receives signals from the agents and varies the buttons in the flash animation. There will be a bird eye’s view camera that records and projects the images of the people walking in the space, and the video will overlay the display system to show how the movements affects the various states of the agents.
This is, as it sounds, a damn complicated project. This means serious amount of work and exploration into constructing the animation and the input system that connects with the digital signals of the agents. I have never tried anything relating with the project before, nor do any people at the university knows much about the subject. Hence I will have to work work work and research research research to get it done.
Phew. Am crossing my fingers.
However, although as impossible and hard as it sounds, I am definitely enjoying it so far. This is by far one of the most interesting thing I’ve ever done (apart from visiting North Korea), and I really look forward to writing more about the progress of this project on this blog. Stay tuned!
This is a project that I had developed for the Robotic Ecologies class that I am currently taking at the University of Virginia Architecture school. The assignment is to design a small robotic system that could be used to produce sounds. I became greatly interested in magnetic filings and its movement of interaction with magnets. The design of the system is simple — four bars of magnets are suspended above a tray containing nine separate circular containers of filings. The magnets are placed in positions to propel against each other, in which as the magnets move across the filings, the filings forms different movement and different patterns inside the dish. Sounds are generated by putting contact microphones under the dishes to record the sound of the movement of the filings by contact. The following video documents the study of the movement of the filings ( filmed and edited by yours truly): As you see, the filings produce interesting movements and patterns as the magnets sweeps through the grid. The sound is surprisingly interesting as well.
