From the 5 universal emotions described in the Atlas of Emotions, we chose to invoke the enjoyment emotion. We wanted to design our device to invoke sensory pleasure(using nice LED lights and pleasing sounds along with an aesthetic look and feel), amusement / wonder (using the organic movement of the neck).
We got inspired from the technology snake robots use to maneuver challenging terrains. They have individual actuators that look like caps with three holes parallel to its axis on the periphery of the actuator. We can connects number of those actuators together using strings and manipulating the strings can bring different movements to the snake robot structure. This motions produced look organic and the manipulation of the neck could be done using servos. We borrowed some individual link actuators from a Robotics Institute PhD student to make our neck portion of the ostrich.
We went through brainstorming sessions to finalize on the snake robot technology to implement our ostrich neck, another idea was to use a series of strings connected to servos to manipulate the rise of fall of various points in the neck (team felt this was more complicated than the snake robot idea). For the outer casing that represents the ostrich body, we initially tried to use foam boards to cut layers to create a concave shell, but could not get the board to cut in proper shape. So for the next iteration used compressed wood board and laser cutter. We designed the body of ostrich such that the servo could be easily housed and created the shapes needed in Adobe illustrator and used Rabbit Laser cutter in ideate lab to cut the board. We resourced boards from wastage to cut our parts. For the iterations on the display modes of information, we initially decided to make the neck move up when the likes to dislikes ration increases and based on the necks position the led on the head of ostrich turns to a different color. Then we realised we can make it more interesting and can inform the user in a mild way with sounds from a piezo if there is a big jump on likes in the past hour.
After we cut our parts using the laser cutter, we assembled the outer casing of the ostrich body. Then we soldered wires to RGB LED and inserted them into the snake robot neck. At this point we got 4 wires coming from the LED and 3 threads holding the shape of the ostrich neck. For the ostrich neck movement we wanted in Z axis only, we sealed the movement of two of 3 strings and connected the remaining to the servo. The servo pulling the string will make the ostrich neck to move in Z axis. The wires from the LED was passed on through the ostrich body casing without disturbing the servo and provide it to the breadboard. Then we fastened the starting of the ostrich neck to the body. After this physical model was setup, we tested this with the code developed in parallel with an rough skeleton version of the setup. Development of code happened in stages. Testing this code with the physical prototype worked well and we could see the neck rise up with color changes when we linked it with a trending controversial super bowl 2017 commercial.
We as a team worked on a new design to create an ambient device that looks beautiful and moves organically to display some information you care about. We had some roadblocks while creating the setup, but overall we think it was a success in terms of the technical achievement and using unique materials. Each one of us learnt something new. The next steps could be to make the ostrich neck more natural looking and also the movement more organic. Maybe we can control the neck better by manipulating all the three threads instead of just one. The size of the ostrich base was also bigger and little disproportional, we can fix that in next iteration. We also burnt few servos and we need to figure out how to avoid that situation.
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