Dome Experiment(IBM Watson Practice)

In this project, we build a little sample for our final project. Our idea, as mentioned in the previous posts, is about building a stress-relieving place. We all agree that this space should be private enough so that the user lying inside of it can really get rid of the troubles he or she encounters in the real life. With this ideology, we think that the physical framework resembles a shield separating two parts of the world, inside is your space, outside is the rest part of the world. To embody that the outside is surrounded by other emotions, we decide to use fastLED to imitate that. We use a getting news API. We collect the information from it every 2 seconds. Using the tone analyzer (since our project is about emotions, we find this one extremely useful and finds it will bring the macro-scaled information like news down to a meso level), we are able to analyze the emotional status of this news. The speed of fastLED changing its color will be based on the top score generated by the tone analyzer. 

Here is a short video showing how it works.

As we see, the dome we are going to build has gaps between blocks and blocks. So we would like to utilize fastLEDs to fill the gaps. And these fastLEDs will also represent the outer world. Changing either too quickly or too slow could be harmful. We hope that users inside the space can ease their emotions peacefully and gradually. Talking about the design of the dome, about how to smoothen the surface inside of it so that the projection could be done more easily, we plan to ask Professor Andy about that. The most likely way to do it is that we utilize woods to build that and Andy was a furniture designer before. So we believe that he knew how to deal with it.

These are the current design and potential output of the dome design.