Physically Interactive System : A Shy / Bold Surface / Wall Pt. 1

For the final project I am build­ing a surface/wall that is defen­sive bold or what have you… As a per­son nears it, it too chal­lenges the user by get­ting closer to the user. It will be com­prised of a set of tri­an­gu­lated sur­faces that are pushed by a servo motor for­ward in the direc­tion of the user… It’s depth is deter­mined by how close you are to it. I have yet to deter­mine what kind of a sen­sor to use because I think this will affect the design and I think I just need to make one com­po­nent and work my way to the over­all larger scaled ver­sion which may or may not hap­pen by finals. Ide­ally the sur­face will pro­trude out in a defen­sive man­ner and when faced with the fact that you will not budge it will retract back to its orig­i­nal posi­tion and in effect trem­ble out of fear… I don’t know that I will get to this but that is how I imag­ined it would be. I have con­sid­ered link­ing it to a pro­cess­ing sketch where per­haps the amount of time and the length or degree of angle would gen­er­ate some kind of mea­sured draw­ing but per­haps that is miss­ing the point… or rather com­pli­cat­ing life for the sake of complication…

Thus far I think I will need 16 servo motors, of course an Arduino, per­haps an Arduino Motor Shield.  I may also need an elec­tri­cal cur­rent higher than 12dc. I need to test some mate­ri­als and the ways in which the sen­sor will be set within the struc­tural sur­face. Or whether the sur­face is stretchy instead of a tri­an­gu­lated hard sur­face. Or whether this will be a sur­face at all…

First ini­tial sketch depict­ing the sur­face and a pos­si­ble way to engage with it by touch­ing grass:

In this sketch [Images on the right] I am think­ing of mak­ing this into smaller com­po­nents. I even won­dered if this mov­ing sur­face could be cov­ered in grass or moss or some­thing soft. The sketched go so far as to describe the inte­rior com­po­nents and how some kind of motor would push these up or out. While sketch­ing I also came to the real­iza­tion that the solid or hard sur­face might need to sit on a more flex­i­ble sur­face. In this way when it col­lapses it can retain its integrity and bend up to form pin­na­cles or pyra­mids when pushed out by a motor.

In this sketch I am start­ing to think about the mechan­ics of motion that I can achieve with the servo motor we were pro­vided in our kits.

With addi­tional appendages the servo motor might prove to be suf­fi­cient. Though I am sure there are eas­ier more expen­sive means.

How do we approach it? What is the over­all effect? Though the final might not be as large as I hope it will be mod­u­lar with the poten­tial to grow into a large piece.

Other options to explore include think­ing about the forms. Why tri­an­gles? Why not circles?

How is this built? What guides the mov­ing parts or appendages up and through to the surface?