“How are we going to interact with the technology of the future and what role does technology have in defining that?”
Mimetics was just one of a number of internal projects developed for the Move Me event hosted at The Mills New York office to coincide with the AICP awards.
The installation consists of four autonomous robots equipped with marker pens that draw on a large sheet of set paper. Within the confines of the paper’s frame, they can whiz around and create art unassisted but at any point guests could take control of any one of the robots by holding their hand over a hand tracking sensor called a Leap Motion. Simple hand gestures would be converted by the robots into movement.
The final result; a crowd sourced collaborative mural and historical record of interaction.
As creative director and lead engineer on the project I was responsible for every aspect of the installation from the design and build of the robots to the development of the hand tracking software and communication between the two. In later iterations of the installation I experimented with using machine learning to adapt and refine the pre-defined hand gestures in an attempt to evolve the control gestures into something more human and intuitive.
