A traditional Japanese garden strives to represent a miniature natural landscape. Following clear aesthetic principles (such as miniaturisation, concealment and asymmetry), a Japanese garden is designed to recreate the eyes and foster contemplation and meditation. Inspired by nature, it is however a work of art: a production of the human mind. Human beings create that order, and then retreat to contemplate it, intervening from time to time to tweak details and maintain the order. We propose here a garden that takes care of itself, that somehow understands and re-interprets the rules of harmony and equilibrium, and reconfigures itself depending on the season, the presence or absence of a human observers – that develops structure in a generative way, creating a dynamic conversation between the elements in the garden.
Some technical details: the base of the lamp is a quad-pod robot from Trossen Robotics (http://www.trossenrobotics.com/). Each lamp posses a different “personality” (hard coded into a hierarchy of probabilistic Markov chains). The lamps sense the surrounding using infrared rangefinders, and communicate with a central computer using an Xbee network; the central computer then provides this information using a wireless OSC network (demo modes can be summoned using an iPad). More interestingly, the lamps are tracked thanks to infrared blinking LEDs on the top – a 120Hz IR camera looking at the garden takes these images, which are convolved by several “reference” signals. We achieved robust tracking with negligible delay (more on this later), and a very good signal to noise ratio.
Videos
Check the videos below (the Torobots have travel the world… )