Four Letter Words from Rob Seward on Vimeo.
Archive for the ‘Prototypes’ Category
Nice Type, Four Letter Words
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010The Price of Innovation and Sharing.
Friday, December 11th, 2009
Youtube Doubler
For a long time the business model of a lot of companies and individuals has been to come up with a great idea, then keep it to your self. This act of proprietary ownership of an idea is deprecated and will only take you so far in this new age of open-source and sharing.
It would not be as intimidating to compete against one group of individuals, but how about a whole town, maybe a city? Well the open-source movement is bigger. It is global.
So what should companies focus their attention on and where should they invest? The answer is, invest in people, invest in tools.
Lets take Youtube for example. They quickly became the worlds fastest growing entertainment(if you want to call it that) and broadcasting social venue and continue growing because they gave people the ability to play with their product for free! Now that they are the front runner, they are not about to let innovation slip in between their fingers. They are giving everyone more of what they want; entertainment and tools to make new things. It is a symbiotic relationship.
Since Youtube has allowed people to play with Youtube’s content. Artists and technologists have made innovation of their own. Examples of this includes inbflat.net which is a webpage where you can play a bunch of Youtube videos simultaneously.
The funny thing about this is that one of my friends had the idea to make this, not in the same manner but very close. I told him at the time that I was sure a hundred other people thought about the same thing and maybe a couple have already built it. And then I saw the proof that I was right. http://youtubedoubler.com/ is around 90% similar to my friends idea, there are a couple of things missing but it there, published, functioning, doing its thing.
This phenomenon is good for Youtube. Its free marketing and advertising for them. So what can they do to get bigger and more profitable? Keep people watching, using experimenting. But that is not all, they also need to change, stay ahead of the curve by making new additions to their offerings.
Youtube Direct will have a major impact on society and the Surveillance/Sousveillance trends.
Now Youtube is also working on the 3D technology which will be a huge market one the polarized LED monitors hit the market. You will be able to see 3d content by browsing the web! The technology is here and about to hit the market.
If you don’t have the 3D Monitors yet, you can use old school 3D red/blue glasses or the good old, cross eyed method to view stereoscopic images!
Blue/Red 3D Video.
Stereoscopic Video.
To find these experimental videos on youtube all you need to do is search for the tag
“yt3d:enable=true”
of these tags:
“yt3d:aspect=3:4″
“yt3d:swap=true”
here are other sample videos:
Jackoon Paints at Gizmodo Gallery 2009
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
Don’t worry you are not seeing double, Jackoon the painting robot has a new friend! Jackoon v.2 is an other hacked toy with a robotic arm made from Jackoon’s blue print. Jackoon v.2 made its debut at The Gizmodo Gallery exhibit and a fine job he did.
The two artbots teamed up to make the paintings of a few subjects including one of the king of all robots R2D2!
The robots used this image as a reference and painted the composition with gray, orange, yellow and black.
2/3 of the way into the painting, I made an outline of where R2D2 was located on the painting. You can see the subtle contour of r2’s body on the robotic painting. I was really happy with the resulting painting.
Also at the gallery where my favorite, the Tesla Coil!
Gizmodo, Starwars-Imperial March by Arcattack from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.
Invisible Currents
Friday, July 17th, 2009
Shark magnetic sensory system from wikipedia.
If we did not have sensitive nerves embedded all over our skin, we would not be able to feel the presence of wind. Similarly, if we don’t have electromagnetic sensors like a shark we cannot sense the presence of magnetic forces. This is an example of electromagnetic pulses that come from the subway system in Japan. This is just one example of simple way you can visualize the invisible forces of the world around you. Think wind!
Art Robotica: Thesis Presentation!
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
Art Robotica is a term used to describe the body of work created by the collaboration of “ArtBot” and artist. ArtBots are Autonomous Machines that paint or draw on a canvas, sheet of paper or a surface of some kind. Art Robotica reflects our new codependency and symbiotic relationship with machines. ArtBots are, in essence, collaborators rather than just new tools.
A presentation of Art Robotica was part of ITP Thesis Week 2009.
The thesis presentation was Tuesday May 5, 2009 at NYU’s ITP (721 Broadway, 4th floor)
Web Video Archive:
http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/thesis2009/video-stream/
This is one of the paintings created so far:
“Girl” 2009, Acrylic on paper, 48″ x40″
To find out more about Art Robotica visit:
http://blubee.com/artRobotica/
More Art Robotica:
http://blubee.com/theblog/?p=318
Artbots The Testing Begins
Monday, April 6th, 2009
The ArtBots begins to take shape. I started the project by tackling the bot that will be the most complex, the hexapod.
I made a the basic form of the bot using some wood screws and tape to begin testing the movement, software and circuit.
Servo Motor Test from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.
I was originally going to attempt to use an Arduino Micro controller to do all the controlling of the servos (video above.) But I slowly realized that to control the timing of all the servos at different time intervals will be a big pain in the butt since the “delay()” function messes with the Arduino code enough to get really buggy.
To hopefully save a headache I bought some servo controllers made by Pololu And so far with the help from Xiaoyang (Alex) Feng and the info posted online about the controller, I got the results I was looking for.
The Pololu Code I used to make the servos move can be found on the Pololu forums The one things that they did not include which is a little confusing, is how to set up the servo controllers if you plan to daisy chain them to control more than 8 servo motors.
To start you should set up your Arduino (above) and a breadboard with the Pololu servo controller (below.)
A couple of things to note:
1. Two different power sources are needed for the servo controllers. One for the controller’s micro controller and the other to power the servo motors. Both power sources should have a common ground.
2. When you set the controller’s number setting, you need to do one at a time.
This is the code I used to program my second controller to know its servos are numbered 8-15 and not 0-7 as they are programmed by default.
http://blubee.com/itp/code/ServoControl_numSettingA.txt
The parameter that sets the servo numbers is the fourth “soft.Serial” line of code “softSerial.print(0×01,BYTE);” This variable can be either 0×00 (hexadecimal) to set the controller to use number 0-7 for the servos, 0×01 to set the controller to use number 8-15 for the servos, 0×02 for numbers 16-23, etc…
Once you upload this code you must wait for the servo controller to get reprogrammed. You will know the servo controller’s settings where changed by the blinky lights on the controller.
Pololu Servo Controller Settings from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.
Once the code has been uploaded and the settings where changes, you MUST delete or comment out, the three lines that set up the servo numbers since you only need to do that step once.
the lines you need to delete or comment out are the following:
softSerial.print(0×80,BYTE);
softSerial.print(0×02,BYTE);
softSerial.print(0×01,BYTE);
Once you comment out the code above, re-load the code onto the Arduino.
When the code is finished uploading nothing will happen, because you need to re-start the Pololu servo controller for the settings to kick in. You can simply unplug the Arduino and the plug it back in to refresh everything. The servos should now move a few degrees back and fourth. Don’t forget to power the servos separately and to have a common ground.
Servo Controller Test from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.
I daisy chained three servo controllers together so that I can control 20 servo motors. This is my first test, one serve per servo controller. So far so good.
Testing Servo Controller with Three Servos from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.
Oscar’s Thesis Concept: The ArtBot
Monday, March 9th, 2009
ArtBots are painting machines that paint their environment in a unique artistic style. They collaborate with each other and with an artist to make a painting. Each robot will have a personality which will translate to their brush strokes and painting style.
These are two quotes from a couple of my favorite artists that inspired me to pursue the concept of a robot artist:
“[painting] is colored dirt smeared on a flat surface, usually stretched around some wooden sticks. And it is for me, the most magical of all mediums. You smear that colored dirt and it makes space where there is no space” ~Chuck Close
“The photograph meant the death of painting, but its resulting to be the opposite. Thanks to photography, art is resuscitating.” ~Salvador Dali
This is what I think the robots will look like in a gallery setting:
The way the robots will function is similar to the way that Jackoon functioned. There will be a video camera in the ceiling that will track the movement of the robots and will be used to know when the robots should paint. All the logic for the painting composition and collision detection will be done in a laptop and sent to the robots with wireless communication. This is an image of the set up:
The mechanics for the mobility of a couple of the robots are inspired by Theo Jansen’s leg design. The other robots will have servo motors and are inspired by hexapod.
I am not the only one using Theo’s leg design, I have a feeling that this design will become very popular as time goes by.
This is a rough sketch of what the robot using the Theo’s leg design may look like, the arrows point to the direction they are facing:
And this is a robot who’s leg design is similar to Theo’s concept but I am hoping that I will be able to get better movement from this design.
This is a simplified sketch of the isolated legs and the places where joints exist:
These are the physical legs that I built and am in the process of testing and some videos that I took of the rough motion that is achieved by the respective designs:
Theo Jansen Leg Design from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.
Theo Jansen Inspired Leg from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.
Stay tuned for updates on the ArtBots!
Initial Thesis Concepts
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Solar Rail system for a train was a concept that I wanted to develop for thesis, but after thinking about the scope and time line of the project, it became cleat that I was being to ambitious. Getting a working prototype will require a little more time and research. The basic idea was to make a network of solar modules that collect energy onto giant capacitors or batteries or some other form of energy storage. The energy would remain stored until the train physically touched the module and began to drain the energy. The result will be a train that gets propelled by an impulse system. This is a rendering of a section of the rail:
An other idea I had was a little rover similar to the Mars Rovers that NASA used to explore Mars. The rovers I wanted to create would communicate with a wireless WIFI connection and be controlled remotely via a browser interface or mobile interface. The drawback from this idea is that there is a similar bot in existence called the rovio so this deterred me from going on this direction. These are the initial sketches:
The next idea I have in mind is to expand on the concept of a painting machine. Last year I made Jackoon the painting Robot. Since that project worked so well, I will be adding to it and making painting bots that are more flexible and can work together to make a painting. This is a quick sketch of the bot:
This is a rendering of what I think the bot will look like:
I will be writing more about the ArtBots soon, once I can wrap my head around what I really want out of these artists.
Pianocktail PREMIERE!
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008Its only a couple of weeks away and the Pianocktail is NOT working yet.
Nevertheless it will work in time for the show. There is no negotiating =)
The Pianocktail has two scheduled shows;
1. Exit Art
475 10th Ave @ 36th ST
New York, NY
Time and Date:
Monday, December 15, 2008
8:00pm - 11:00pm
2. ITP Winter Show
721 Broadway 4th Fl.
New York, NY
Time:
Wednesday, Dec. 17th 2008.
Thursday, Dec. 18th 2008.
5pm-9pm
WAMI Dome at Electronic Social Club Exhibit.
Monday, November 17th, 2008
The WAMI Dome got some exposure at the Electronic Social Club’s Annual Exhibit at Hunter College. Everyone really enjoyed to play with the little dome and its square wave sounds.
This is a video of the dome in action:
The Jimmy (WAMI Dome) at ESC Exhibit. from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.