My long time experience in traditional and digital animation drove me into the idea that user changes several key factors of an animation such as keyframes, characters or environment and gets involved in highly interactive experience rather than just watches what happened in a screen. I thought combination of physical character(kind of a puppet) and 'Processing(an open source programming language)' together would work great to make the idea realized.
With this concept, I could meet the partner, Adi who also had interest in animation. We did brainstorming and lots of research on a wide range of works related to animation and interaction.
However, I, first, got a little doubt how to make a physical character alive in a way of interacting between user input and movement of the physical character. Several ideas hit me on the head and I picked up one, spinning LED matrix which creates kinds of hologram. That means user draws a shape on a input device(ex. using LEDs as a photo diode) and an animated illusion shows up on the hologram based on the user’s drawing.
At this point of time, Adi suggested a wonderful idea, a straw doll, controlling the arms and legs of a character by pulling down strings connected inside the doll. It gave me a clue to solve my doubt and got back my eagerness to give a physical character a life on the table.
After that, we started to look for any possibility to realize these two options, LED hologram and a straw puppet. In the processes of testing, we found that the persistence of vision was much strong than we had expected. I think this can be solved if we use a device limiting the intensity of LED light or control the blinking speed of LEDs. But we had to put this option away because it required much time and technical knowledge to solve.
Inspired by a design of commercial doll, cha-cha, I got an idea using metal springs and simple plastic body.
Adi had a amazing skill to make a physical thing. We could make a really cool doll, Mr. Tech, using metal springs, acrylic plates and wood. We put a dot matrix expressing happy and sad face reacting to some conditions of virtual reality in Mr. Tech.
Testing with Mr. Tech was really fun but wiring him to computer gave user heavy constraints to joy of interaction. So I tried to use Xbee for wireless serial communication.
I was eager to implement wireless networking but time didn’t allow me to give a big present to Mr. Tech. I’m so sorry to him because he lost the chance to move and interact more freely with users.
We finally introduced Mr. Tech at my class, Physical computing and ICM, on early December, 2008. It was a great work and exciting experience. Thanks to my class mates, Kate and Shawn, and especially Adi.
Here is the link for presentation.
http://itp.nyu.edu/~sjh376/Final/Last/FinalPT.pdf
Here is the link for the test movie which I made by controlling Mr. Tech by myself.
http://itp.nyu.edu/~sjh376/Final/MTMovie.mov
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