September 28, 2011
Blind Man’s Bluff
Engineer and robotocist Dr Adam Spiers from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory brought his Haptic Lotus – a robotic flower like “a really dreadful Sat Nav” – to the Secret Garden Party. Here he tells us about the device, which uses infrared to help the sighted and the blind to move via touch, and “that weird parental feeling that I hope other engineers get when seeing a creation working in the field”.
“It’s like a flower you hold in your hand, but it’s a robot and it tells you where to go… in the dark”. This is what I found myself shouting at the progressively bemused couple I’d just met on Friday night on the Chair Swing ride. We were flying through the air at the time, which explains the shouting, though the conversation had started while we were all still stationary, with an innocent “so what brings you to the festival?”.
That was certainly one thing I learned quickly about the Secret Garden Party: everyone likes to chat. In fact, it was probably this friendliness that meant we (me, Navjit Sagoo and Peter Bennett, my two assistants for the day) could get away with blindfolding strangers before fitting them with headphones and sending them into a couple of darkened gazebos on a race to return with a silver capsule filled with sweets before their friends could.
Actually, what we were really doing was a practical demonstration of sensory augmentation, which is where the “typical” human sensory spectrum is modified, either to improve certain abilities, or to attempt to figure out something about how our minds and bodies work. In our Thursday-long installation / demonstration we gave our volunteers a handheld device, called the Haptic Lotus, to aid them on their blindfolded quest.
The Haptic Lotus. Photo courtesy of Braunarts.
Like a number of sensory substitution devices, the Lotus is a navigation aid. Quite often I explain it to people as akin to “a really dreadful Sat Nav”. It has no screen, no speakers and no satellite positioning. But then that’s the fun bit. You see, the Lotus really is a robotic flower that you hold in your hand, and by opening and closing its plastic petals it can communicate with whoever is holding it via their sense of touch, which is known in certain circles as “haptics”.
IMPOSSIBLE ALONE
Tim Murray-Browne, an engineer and PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, brought IMPOSSIBLE ALONE to the Secret Garden Party this summer. He tells us more about this interactive installation and what it has to do with “science, technology, dance and life in general”.
At eleven on Sunday morning at the Secret Garden Party, when many were asleep, some still awake, and most struggling somewhere between the two, strange noises were emanating from the Guerilla Science tent. A small crowd watched as wary volunteers were paired up to perform what looked like synchronised tai chi. Under the gaze of a Kinect depth camera wired into a laptop, their movements were analysed and transformed into music. That is, until they deviated from synchrony – whereupon a crack of thunder resounded through the arena. This was the debut of IMPOSSIBLE ALONE, an interactive installation exploring the space between musical performance, creative movement and video-games. A series of sound worlds await exploration through the movements of two people, but only if they work together and mirror each other throughout.
It’s a project I had been working on for a couple of months in collaboration with Tiff Chan, a dancer who researches the teaching of movement through the principles of play. When Guerilla Science got in touch with the opportunity of showing IMPOSSIBLE ALONE at the Secret Garden Party we were of course thrilled, if a little apprehensive. It was conceived as a wander-in-wander-out installation, where two individuals interact in an unfamiliar way, provoking and disinhibiting each other and creating a personal connection with each other and with the soundscapes they explore. The amusement of spectators was always secondary to that of the participants. Now, it needed to become a one hour show. And be ready a month earlier than planned.
We knew that an hour of asking for volunteers to come forward and provide a commentary on their moves could quickly get dull. We needed a narrative, one that could keep an audience interested while communicating what ideas had led to the work, what we are trying to achieve, and how this is relevant to science, technology, dance and life in general.
Why Not Pedal A Submarine To Bestival?
Mechanical engineer Keri Collins from the University of Bath joined us at Bestival to explain why fish – and even turtles – are the best inspiration for submarine design, and how next year she might be the queues to the Isle of Wight in a pedal-powered sub…
Biomimetics, also known as bio-inspiration, bionics or biomimicry, is the process of looking at how problems are solved in the natural world and using that information to create solutions to our own technological problems. This isn’t as simple as straightforward copying though – if you strapped a pair of wings to your arms and waved them around, you wouldn’t be able to fly, you’d just get tired. And yet birds have been instrumental in creating our own flying machines, from aeroplanes to helicopters to small flying spy craft, often called micro air vehicles. The key is to isolate the physical principle and apply it in a new context.
At Bestival, I explained to the gathered crowd some of the fish-inspired propulsion projects I have been involved in. Through an audience participation exercise, we explored the many ways in which fishes swim.
Swish... swish... Keri Collins flexes her fins.
From Nemo-esque clown fish, rowing with their pectoral fins, to the giant Manta rays, to wiggly eels, each fish has evolved according to its environmental niche. So fish-inspired propulsion has a large pool (no pun intended) to draw from. click to read more »
September 27, 2011
Wired: The Astronomer’s Ball
Wired Magazine has published a short piece our upcoming event, the Astronomer’s Ball – read more here!
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