Unnatural selection, the new moniker for the reactive furniture project, has been progressing well at the studio. Here’s some images of the prototype in progress.
Prototype: Reactive Furniture Video
tableDemo from prototype committee on Vimeo.
Here’s some video to complement our experiments documented in the previous post.
Prototype: Reactive Furniture
Quite a successful day creating the proof of concept for our reactive furniture project. The first step in further versions of increasing complexity.
Here’s a brief post with some images of our work. We built a model table, then kitted it out with wheels, geared motors, castors, a 9v power source, Maxsonar proximity sensor and an arduino with motor shield. All of this combined made a miniature table with a nervous disposition that moved away from who / whatever is approaching it.
This is stage one in developing the project; a full size version will follow with further sensing abilities and increased mobility.
Dennis Hong: My seven species of robot
At TEDxNASA, Dennis Hong introduces seven award-winnning, all-terrain robots — like the humanoid, soccer-playing DARwIn and the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR — all built by his team at RoMeLa, Virginia Tech. Watch to the end to hear the five creative secrets to his lab’s incredible technical success.
Dennis Hong is the founder and director of RoMeLa — a Virginia Tech robotics lab that has pioneered several breakthroughs in robot design and engineering.
Keloid – Beautiful, if not terrifying, CGI robots
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote about an experiment which had to do with Artificial Inteligence. In a near future, man will have given birth to machines that are able to rewrite their codes, to improve themselves, and, why not, to dispense with them. This idea sounded a little bit distant to some critic voices, so an experiment was to be done: keep the AI sealed in a box from which it could not get out except by one mean: convincing a human guardian to let it out.
What if, as Yudkowsky states, ‘Humans are not secure’? Could we chess match our best creation to grant our own survival?. Would man be humble enough to accept he was superseded, to look for primitive ways to find himself back, to cure himself from a disease that’s on his own genes? How to capture a force we voluntarily set free? What if mankind worst enemy were humans?
In a near future, we will cease to be the dominant race.
In a near future, we will learn to fear what is to come.
Vive Les Robots
Found this great little Danish company today – Vive Les Robots
From their site: VIVE LES ROBOTS! is the only company in the World, who wants to make more people interested in robots, robotics and robot-related stuff from ancient times to modern times, based on a culture-historical approach.
Visit their site here: Link: http://www.vivelesrobots-education.dk/english
Micro Robotic Bees, Assembled Like Origami
This article comes via Wired.com, and reports on the Monolithic Bee project at Harvard University, where they have found an ingenious way to construct small scales bio-mimetic robots. It doesn’t actually show them flying or swarming, but it’s damn fine work nonetheless.
From Wired:
Harvard University engineers have come up with a production technique inspired by pop-up books and origami, that allows clones of tiny robots to be mass-produced in sheets.
Pratheev Sreetharan and colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory have been working on bio-inspired robots that are about the same size as a bee, can fly and can work autonomously as a robotic colony.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/robotic-bee/
More information direct from Harvard: http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/pop-up-flying-robots
Mind Controlled Applications – NeuroSky Mindwave Headset
Just purchased a NeuroSky Mindwave Headset for the Prototype Committee cause.
From the Myndplay website:
Control Music, Movies, Videos and Games with your mind…
The NeuroSky MindWave takes decades of expensive medical EEG technology and puts it into a bundled software package for under £100. It safely measures brainwave signals and monitors the attention and relaxation levels of users as they interact with games, video and learning applications.
http://myndplay.com/products.php?prod=5
More information and images to follow once we’ve experimented with it.
NeuroSky Brainwave Visualizer Introduction from Tansy Brook on Vimeo.
The Brainwave Visualizer is a great “starter” application and introduction to NeuroSky’s technology. It shows the wearer the three different types of brainwave information coming off the ThinkGear chip as well as providing the ability to identify blinks.
This video includes a voiceover explanation of the information displayed.
The NeuroSky Brainwave Visualizer is works with both NeuroSky headsets and is available for free from the
NeuroSky store (but requires a headset to use): http://store.neurosky.com/products/visualizer-2-0
Feel free to reference, download and distribute this video. It is not copyrighted.
Update:
Headset arrived the next day, and looks great. Can’t wait to get started with it…
Raspberry Pi – $25 Linux Box
The Raspberry Pi isn’t quite in full production yet – first models have been auctioned off – but should be out soon. The idea? Make a DIY Linux box you can buy for peanuts and build on yourself. Aside from applications for hackers, artists and makers it could also provide computing access to the poorest communities in the world.
A simple yet brilliant idea, and I’m looking forward to it being released for general sale. Read more about it here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/
UPDATE 29th Feb 2012:
Great to see Raspberry Pi getting a lot of coverage on the BBC News website and TV. Though it seemed to focus mainly on the educational aspect rather than how Makers, Hackers and Artists might use it. Also no mention of context – Arduino, open source electronics and Linux. But good to see it in the public eye nonetheless.
BBC Article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17192823
Prototype Committee have registered and got in line on RS Components for the first shipment. Interested? You can sign up here.