Robotic – Final Project Ideas, Researches and Prototypes.

A Continuation from the previous Idea and Research, Part 1 where I wanted to do an Animatronic Turtle.

The Difference between a Turtle and a Tortoise is that all Tortoises are turtle and not all turtles are tortoise. Generally, Tortoise live on land and turtle lives in water most of the time, with exceptions which I’ll not go into. However in my Project, I’ve decided to use “Turtle” as I simply prefer the sound of Turtle more than Tortoise.

First thing.

How do Turtle/Tortoise walk?

Tortoise are cute! and the way they walk naturally are quite robotic =D

the “Hand” are much longer and the “feet” are much shorter in comparison. This is how a Tortoise retract its head, by bending its “neck” inwards. maybe I could emulate this.


29:43 – 30:20 where they talk about the locomotion of the tortoises

I could use a lever system to move the front and back legs so that I could use smaller motor and all 3 motor placed in the shell so the overall weight of the feet will be greatly reduced to allow me to use smaller/weaker motors.

From my research I’ve done and found this EEZYbotARM on Thingiverse which I could use it to study the mechanics I could potentially use in the feet of the Turtle.

The two motor is at the base of the mechanical arm(Typebot), in comparison to our typebot, This Typebot system is less efficient unless the torque of the motor far exceed the weight of the system and only a when there is a short (A) to (B) distance(longer fulcrum, more torque needed to turn it)

So to understand how fully it works and if there are any restrictions to this lever system, the best way is to having a study model to study how I could incorporate it into my Turtle. I also purchased a few servo few weeks ago and they also arrived so I used them in the study model.

The movement is really smooth and the movement coverage is definitely good enough for my turtle, However this system could barely carry its own weight as the base is relatively heavy, this Lever system could work great as a Type bot kind of project because doesn’t need to carry the base of the robotic arm, in my opinion, this probably wont work in my Turtle since each leg will still carry its motor weight because they are all in the shell, so having Motor(A) not carrying Motor(B) is of less importance since Motor(A) and Motor(B) will ultimately carry the weight of (A)+(B)+the mount+components+the shell in the end.

In Conclusion

I’ll need to find a more efficient system or use a bigger motor to do the work of lifting everything in the shell along with the motors and still able to cover the movements. Now my main concern will be

Weight of motor VS its Torque
Size of Motor (slightly bigger motor will result in MUCH BIGGER TURTLE which I’ll try to avoid as I wanted a COMPACT turtle, not a monster.)
Movements of motor especially within the shell.

 

 

 

Robotics – HUMAN+ Reflection and critics

Human+ was an eye-opener for me in the sense that the robotics we have now is still in the developing stage and we are still years apart from artificially intelligence robots like we saw in the movies.

Chris Trying to interact with Nadine.

The Robotic piece which caught my attention was Nadine and I saw the previous group of strangers whom had some interaction with Nadine, she was not reacting to my speech, but she seem to be able to “look” and wave at me when I was sitting down. That’s why I am sure that the camera and most of her movements are working well. Nadine is a robot made in NTU which is trilingual and knew English, French and German and I am impressed with it.

or maybe its my horrible English. Also to clarify, I am really amazed when I sat in front of Nadine and she “look” at me and I felt intrigued so I do not see the project Nadine as a failure at all even if it does not register what I said, Nadine is awesome and the quality is superb and since people are in the developing of AI globally, I see Nadine as a stepping stone to push for more advance and intelligent developer to get over the technological hurdle to make her to act exactly like a real human.Photo credit to Isaac Chu

The hardest animatronics to replicate is human as we grew up looking at peoples all the time and, we are so good in observing facial expression and how a normal should normally look and act, an abnormality in the expression will make them unnatural but Nadine was really well made and had almost past the uncanny valley which if she sits on the chair, with eye closed, she will look exactly like a human being when not moving.

I think few years later, we will be able to interact with robots so advanced that we will have a hard time distinguishing a robot from a real person.This humanoid robot is eerily lifelike

Interactive Devices – HUMAN+ Reflection and critics.

Through the exhibition, it kept coming to me that human was always seeking to be a better version of ourselves and it’s only recent in human history that we are able to breakthrough some technological barriers which finally make some progress in augmenting human’s physical and biological to make improvements. Since I personally think that morality is just a concept which is generally accepted by the culture, there should be no right and wrong in the idea of augmenting human, even on genetically modifying a baby since culture will change depending on time and location, genetically modification might be the norm in 20 years time.

The work that I am most interested in was the Tardigotchi.

Tardigotchi is a work done by SWAMP collaboration with Tiago Rorke.

The basic idea of Tardigotchi is to have two pet, one tardigrade and an digital avatar of the tardigrade. A tardigrade is an eight legged water animal which could live in the harshest environment on earth and even outerspace, I remember watching a documentary years ago about astronaut sending tardigrate into the space to test if they can survive the vacuum and radiation. Not only the tardigrate survived, they lived happily and reproduced in space and this was the reason that I really love this project and is sure that there is a real tardigrate inside of the sphere.

Another reason that I really love this work as I had thought about doing a project last year for Interactive 2 which reflect on my childhood where we keep tamagotchi as pet and I wanted to recreate a project similar to tamagotchi but on a bigger scale, like a projection at ADM lounge and we will have an ADM pet. So this project resonate with me a lot personally, just by seeing this project lying in Human+ exhibition, I knew i will write about this instantly.

This is the Tardigotchi in Dublin Human+ exhibition and it seems so much nicer then the rapid prototyped model here in Singapore.

Hyperessay #1: Concepts in Social Broadcasting

Before the start of this module, the idea of social broadcasting and Live streaming was really intimidating to me and I would probably never do it unless there is reasons that I must, and this module was the reason. After 6 occasion of going on live and broadcasting, it is still intimidating for me to do so, maybe this was the beauty of it, the realness aspect to the Live streaming which made it frightening and interesting.

In the first lesson, we had Real Time Aggregation 

15 min of randomness in adm

Posted by ZiFeng Ong on Thursday, 17 August 2017

which was also my first facebook live ever. And I was ferociously dropkicked out of the comfort zone to produce my first Live video ever, but through it, I learnt how to use the Facebook Live function properly and upon inspecting my piece while writing the OSS post about it,I notice a few pointers which could be used in the future – to talk morein the video and also the function of switching the phone’s front and back camera, both of it greatly influenced the way the second Facebook Live assignment – Alter Ego : I Am Bonnie whereby Bonnie was born. This was my favorite piece I produced due to the reaction of the audience, Bonnie was well loved(hated) by many!

I am Bonnie, a Pokemon trainer from Japan. I want to be the very best like no one ever was, to catch them is my real test, to train them is my cause. This is a Alter Ego project for assignment 2, sorry but I hope you don't get cancer from watching/hearing this.

Posted by ZiFeng Ong on Wednesday, 23 August 2017

Lets Start by going through our Critiques

Learning from the past to create the future was always something which I believed in, we did the VideofreexHole in SpaceBOLD3RRR and world longest collaborative sentence critiques. Out of these, the Videofreex and Bold3RRR had influence immensely in my approached of live broadcasting. Videofreex taught me that for us to create something that is really unique and legendary, we have to put ourselves in a situation where we are outside of the comfort zone, taking risk and breaking rules sometime would result in peculiar outcomes.

I used to think that “Broadcasting” was a concept that I’ll film anything I wanted and put it on broadcast where many audience could view it at the same time, this changed after I saw “Here comes the Videofreex” – in the video, they transit from a “group that film and broadcast however they want” in their early work to the work after they shifted to lanesville where they had their local community to participated in their broadcast, this changed from “I film and you watch” way of broadcast to “Lets create a community and be in this together and we will all enjoy the process” concept. This is where the “Social” in Social Broadcasting” comes in.

And then, comes BOLD3RRR which contradicted everything I just said.

BOLD3RRR is a piece that the artist do whatever what he wants, producing an artwork which hardly make any sense if you watched it once, but is that a good piece?
Definitely!
The fact that I am more captivated by BOLD3RRR than any other Critics we had done in this course… But why?

Because Logic doesn’t explain this piece, there is no visible theory about BOLD3RRR, Jon Cates is a unique artist that made all his work heterodoxically, he not conformed into the mainstreams and social restriction, he produces them as he sees fit. This was what made his work amusing to return to, every time I re-watched BOLD3RRR, I gained something new from it as if watching it for the first time.

Videofreex VS BOLD3RRR in the battlefield of social broadcasting

So, there is two extremes in social broadcasting – something that have the audience to participate in the broadcasting as the SOCIAL Broadcasting, and something that the artist do however he wants and the audience will have mixed emotion as the SOCIAL Broadcasting. Any one of which is better than the other? I don’t know, it is only the matter of preferences. For me, one made sense but I only watched once and that’s it(BORING). another was a total nuts but I watched more than 30 times and still cant fully get it(AMUSING).

What about Hole in Space and world longest collaborative sentence ?

Hole in Space and world longest collaborative sentence are two piece which were really similar. The main artwork was the audience’s intercommunication and what the artist did was to create a platform for the audience to interact with each other. Is that Social broadcasting? Sure it is~ the social(many people) aspect is there, the broadcasting(many viewer on the same time at different place) aspect is there be it the communication medium was through video or text, their essence were the same.

Back to the work I did.

OBS livestream was an evolution for me after BOLD3RRR enlightened me to use pre-recorded clips into my livestream to give it an unique look that many events were happening on the screen at the same time and the audio from the pre-recorded clip will cut into my current live speech. This will slightly disorientate the viewer(I hope) and having them to listen closely if they were watching just like how I did with BOLD3RRR. I also lived up to what I said after the Real Time Aggregation, where I will talk more in the future and getting out of the comfort zone.

Lastly was the Cross Stream -Intoxicated along with the Cross Stream Technical Test.

In this Cross Stream, we had the abstract approach and it will be alright if the user does not understand this piece as we do not want to be conformed into the mainstream idea of broadcasting and wanted to try exploring what we wouldn’t otherwise explore. Our objective was to disorient the viewers by progressing the level of drunkenness through sound, visual and camera movements, all of these were inspired by BOLD3RRR where he used the glitches paired with pre-recorded audios and visual as part of his live stream just like what we did in our OBS stream.

 

In Conclusion

I think that there isn’t one best Social Broadcasting solution that could fit it all as Social Broadcasting come in all platforms and mediums, it is impossible for us to pinpoint what is the purpose or the appearance of Social Broadcasting, it could be in video format, text, audio and I am sure it will soon be possible to broadcast with all the senses(like touch or smell) in the near future . The only common parallels which I could draw from all the critics and my works is that – Social Broadcasting is to communicate and there is no best method for communication. We could simply(arguably) say that, shouting in the public is a form of social broadcasting.

 

Through this half of the semester, this GIF speaks a million words.

“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.”

-Brian Tracy

 

Critics:
Videofreex,
Hole in Space,
BOLD3RRR,
world longest collaborative sentence

Work:
Real Time Aggregation,
Alter Ego : I Am Bonnie ,
Adobe Connect,
OBS livestream,
Cross Stream

Robotics – Class Assignment 2 : Come On Barbie. (SuHwee and ZiFeng)

Our Initial idea was to have a head to bang onto the wall/table just because it will be sadistic and funny to watch. So our basic idea was to use strings and wires with plates for the head to move in any direction like to swivel around as it adds to the eccentric aspect of our idea. We did lots of trial and error as we were not sure what could work or not. First, we 3D modeled the servo mount which will pull the strings.

Meanwhile, we also went to look around in carousell for heads which could fit into our project nicely and is near for us to purchase them so we asked countless of dolls/plushie sellers on carousell

Then we realized that a square base we did previously was relatively inefficient as the part of the servo that spins was not centralize within the mount so we re-designed the 3D model.

After which, we did experiments with the plate for the “Neck” of the doll.


One spring in the middle was too flimsy until we added strings

emulation of 3 motors and movements, We were impressed.

And we fixed everything together and tied it with fishing lines.

With the setup above, the doll head was relatively heavy when attached to it,so it does not come back to the standing position so we modified the system with some blue felt to strengthen the system by a bit.

and then after some coding……

Cross Streaming Technical Test (With Bao)

Since the last time we cross streamed during the lesson:

part 2. Adventure in ADM

Posted by ZiFeng Ong on Thursday, 14 September 2017

Video from my phone which I am unable to embed in this post, not sure why but all the setting are the same, >>CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO<<

we noticed that there were two major flaws in the cross streaming system, During that lesson, we used Bao’s Windows Laptop and my phone, both connecting to the ADM internet, since the Laptop were supposed to stream a live video and produce a stream at the same time, we could say that it is downloading and uploading at the same time hence the total bandwidth the computer had was split into two. The biggest problem we found in the cross streaming was that by having the phone connecting to the school internet, every time when the phone goes to a different area in ADM, there will be a short breakage with the connection in the Live video as the Wifi connection changed router, moreover, if the phone Wifi isn’t strong, the quality of the live video drop drastically, The lagginess was amplified by the low bandwidth of the computer, its as good as watching an already choppy movie with lousy dial-up internet, the overall experience wasn’t good.

HENCE! Through reverse engineering, by judging from the quality of the video, we could see which area in ADM have the best internet connection!
The connection in the classroom was the worst. look at the pixelated graphics, I am not moving and yet the terrible quality.
The Internet connection at basement was as bad as in the class, everything was blurry, cant even recognize the people in the video, BAAADD~
The Stairs to the basement doesn’t seem to have good connections and blurry visual doesn’t look pleasing at all.
The Lounge was having generally acceptable connection and hence the better quality
The Lounge’s connection was really stable and the quality is great
IM room got one of the best connection out of all place and the graphical quality was superb even when I was swinging the camera around. (Please scroll up to see the quality of the basement classroom, you will notice a clear difference in the relationship of better internet = better video.)

 

This is why, we will solve it, by hook or by crook.

The easiest problem to solve was when the phone connects to the school Wifi and the connection breaks when the phone switch router among ADM. Since the problem is with school’s Wifi, we tried to use our own phone’s Mobile Data, there was almost no lag and furthermore, the quality of the stream improved drastically due to the faster uploading speed from the phone, resulting in higher definition of the live stream.

Songyu Bao experiment 1

Posted by ZiFeng Ong on Tuesday, 19 September 2017

Notice that when I changed zone within ADM, from IM room all the way to the handicap lift near the library, there was no breakage of the connection even in the handicap lift. This, I must say, is a great improvement.

Next, is the problem of watching stream and uploading a stream from the computer and split the bandwidth into two, there is no way around it, the only approach we can do is to find a place with good internet connection and make sure that the speed will be sufficient to produce excellent streaming experience. AND GUESS WHICH PLACE IN ADM HAVE GOOD INTERNET? So, without further ado, we went to the IM room as the internet connection was relatively stable there.

Again, I can’t figure out why the Video doesnt want to embed, so.. >>CLICK HERE FOR TEST VIDEO FROM BAO<< 

but here’s the Screen shot from the video Bao and I Crossstreamed 

Overall through our test, it worked really well with minimal lag and there were no disconnections, quality were much better than we thought and we hope that we could be replicated it during the class.

 

 

Interactive Devices – Final Project Research 1: Brainstorming

For Interactive Devices Project, I Intended to do it as a solo project so that I could possibly learn more through the exploration process.

After some research, I’ve got 3 general ideas in mind which I might consider:

Wearable Devices:

  • Could be for Fashion

    – Something that look nice

  • Could be for Entertainment

    – Something that is amusing to the user/viewer

  • Could be for Practical uses

    – Something like an Air-condition system

  • Could be for medical purposes

Musical Devices:

  • Could be a totally new instrument that is not available in the market.

  • Could be a system which plays existing instruments:

    – Strum Guitar
    – Blow Pipes/Flute
    – Ring Bells

  • Incorporate the pendulum

    – Pendulum is a interesting object which produces beats
    – is rather amusing

  • Reads Music sheet and play it automatically

    – Could be like a music box

Magnetic Devices:

  • Magnets have really interesting properties
  • Could be a combination of permanent magnets and Electrical magnets.
  • Magnetic could result in levitation of objects which are really amusing

Conclusion

Overall, out of the 3 main categories of Wearable, Music Instrument and Magnetic devices, I like the idea of making an musical instrument more and my initial idea is a device which could read music sheets like a music box. I shall explore more on music box in the next research post.

Year 2 sem 2 – Narrative for interaction – The Four Concept Reflection

The Four Concept is a really interesting piece as it is written in a way that it is a narrative piece on its own with “Initial State”, “Insight Brought about Changes” and “Repetition” which is mentioned under the definition of “Narrative” used as a structure of the essay (mentioning that the four concept deserve a spanking something similar in the essay which I think it is really “playful”)

The first thing that blows my mind is “All narrative is interactive”….. I didn’t think about this before as like our Prof Vladimir asked something like “how can a painting (Wanderer above Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich) be interactive?” and we denied that it is interactive because that it is only a painting and painting doesn’t interact back. But this is not actual case as the fact that when we look at the painting, we will have a thought about the piece like “wow!! What a magnificent view!!” which only happens after we see it. Yes, it does not speak to us, but we feel and think about something because of it and it is the way that the piece of painting is “Speaking” to us when we “View” it. In a sense, this is a two way communication and therefore considered an “Interactive” “Narrative”.

Throughout the Essay, there is a constant classification of ideas into layers which not only interlace, but also was built upon the previous layers, like “Game Play” is built upon “Ludic activity” which is built upon “being playful”, I think this is really interesting as it split the idea of “Play” into different yet similar concepts. While reading this, I copied out a few sentence which gave me ideas that could be used to build into a final project, which are “”narrative have events”, “Cognitive Interactivity” “play -> Rigid rules -> Freedom within the rules”, these ideas helped me to formulate the idea of making a game which fulfills all of the prospects for the project – interactivity and narrativity while giving me the tools I need for producing the game – common knowledge relevant to our class, rules for games, and also freedom within the rules I created.