1. Initial plan:

 

We were interested in capturing motion and designing a kinetic sculpture that shows the motion almost frame by frame in a physical 3D form. We wanted to document athletic movements because it is a beautiful representation of the human body. We connected the Kinect to Grasshopper in order to capture the motion. We had technical constraints first of all with the fact the we can only use Grasshopper on windows and we could not install Kinect on school computers. When we solved this problem, we experimented with the motion. We got interesting results but it was too abstract and unrefined. The result was almost incomprehensible that it’s a human in motion. We played around with the duration between the frames to get more detail. The most ideal duration was 5 ms but still it was too abstract. When we off set the shape it looked interesting but not the direction we were hoping.

2. New Idea

A. Concept // We noticed how social media has become so powerful over the years. People rely on it to share personal moments or convey political and social concerns. We were inspired to create a personal assistant to take care of social media errands as a critical design piece. Fame, the name of this assistant, is almost like a physical form for Siri used for Twitter. Twitter is an asymmetric platform that a lot of people are able to reach out to a lot of influential figure and voice out their opinion.

B. Process + Execution //

We used a 3D sense scanner to scan our female friend. We imported the scan to 123D machined used the slice tool to prepare the file for laser cutting. We chose to laster cut cardboard instead of 3D printing for example because we can manipulate the pieces easily while adding the wires. The layers gave as an opportunity to try the best way to organize and place the material.

We will be using voice recognition to send tweets. So user would say whatever they want to tweet and Fame, the name of our prototype, will automatically share the tweet on the user’s account.

C. Outcome