So, Christine, Hande, and I went back and forth with ideas. Here are our four main contenders and our reasoning for rejecting our three rejected ideas.
1.) "Wendy Wellesley" She would be a bust of a person. She would interact with whoever walked by her in her display case in many different ways; she would follow them with her eyes, make faces at them, offer words of condolences, and rotate her head 360 degrees. These actions would be triggered by her sensing her surroundings using a camera to sense where the people in front of her were, and a microphone to sense the words that people are saying. We considered trying to sense what people were saying, but we really don't have the expertise to do such sentiment analysis.
We ended up going with a version of this puppet. We heavily modified this plan and a description of what we ended up with will follow in future posts.
2.) Dancing Elephant. This elephant would have a repertoire of learned dances such as the Macarena, YMCA, shopping cart, Tunak Tunak Tan, etc... When a person called out a dance, he would dance that particular dance to music. Also, when he wasn't dancing, he would have some other reactions to people. Originally, we also thought that this elephant would have mannerisms similar to our professor, but our professor told us that it would be too creepy to do so.
This idea was the most popular with our classmates. However, after consulting with our professor, we were fairly certain that this idea was way out of reach. We then tried to modify this idea to make it more feasible (by turning the elephant into a marionette puppet and only having one dance, or perhaps instead of learning a particular dance, having one side of the marionette controlled by the user and the other side controlled by a program) but these ideas did not resonate the same way that the original did.
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| Sketch of dancing elephant - courtesy of Christine |
3.) (Dancing?) Shadow Puppets. I love shadow puppets and thought it would be cool to make a shadow puppet. This puppet would consist of delrin sheet plastic connected by delrin rods on the pivot joints. The motors would control each of the limbs of our puppet directly (we were afraid of using string, because dealing with tangled string would be too much of a headache). All of the plastic would be in a box behind a sheet and a light would shine on the sheet, revealing only the shadow of the plastic. This puppet would execute a predetermined show. I thought it would be a little easier to execute, because we wouldn't have to cover the delrin plastic with anything and nothing would have to be three-dimensional. It would be tricky to hide the motors, but that would be one of the only concerns.
This puppet wasn't very popular with our class and therefore we abandoned it. We also thought that it would be too simple, because it did not use any complicated sensors; it just would use a simple touch sensor which would signal the start of the show, but that would be the extent of the interaction.
4.) Sock Puppets. This project was inspired my dad. I used to complain that I did not have a radio in my room and to compensate, he used to throw sock puppet shows to get me to bed, complete with songs and everything. So, for our project, we would have some puppets made of plastic controlled by some motors which would be covered by some socks. These puppets would interact with each other and the audience, which it would sense with a camera, and give an interactive show similar to the interactive shows that my dad use to throw. We also thought it might be fun to have them be male and female puppets where the male puppet would react to low voices and female puppet would react to high voices.
This puppet idea also wasn't popular with our class. We also did not have a really clear vision of exactly what kind of show we wanted to throw. For any given show idea, only 2 of the 3 members of the group agreed, so we did not have a clear direction. For the above reasons, our group decided to drop this idea.
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| Sketches of 1,3,4 - courtesy of Christine |
