Project Origin and Designs
Our idea for the project originated from a brainstorming session. We had all agreed that it would be interesting to do an interactive performance on the third story of Step 2 of the project, also known as the pandemic story. After deciding the setting, we also brainstormed what kind of interactive project would make living in a pandemic world more bearable. Moreover, the plague in the story would slowly paralyze anybody that is infected, so an interactive design to help them is almost necessary
We ultimately decided on a robot that can be controlled using some kind of… controller. The controller would have to have a small range of motion, as the people using the controller are halfway paralyzed. I believe the original idea of the controller came from my Step 1: Research interactive project: the haptic controller. A haptic controller is basically an interactive controller that responds with the user, giving real time feedback to the user. We ultimately decided to model our haptic controller a little bit off of Stanford Robotics Laboratories’s own haptic controller that was mainly used to control a virtual avatar. However, this controller would be used to control a robot that would do the most mundane tasks for the user.
The problem with the robots however, was that we had to make them as realistic as possible (at least in theory). Robots need to go through multiple stages of testing before they get released into the masses while also needing to improve on its prior model. So we decided that one robot should be an older model and the other should be a new one with better features. And what better features to have on a robot than literal wings.
Group Dynamic
Getting to work with the group was the best part of the project for me. Interacting with them and having people to bounce my ideas off of while, at the same time, having them pass ideas through me as well. We all basically had the same job but done slightly differently. We all used the cardboard and built different things as well as contributed the storyboarding process, but we had our specific skill sets for these. For example, a teammate suggested the wings, but none of us except her had the artistic capabilities to implement this.
Rehearsal and Performance
The rehearsing process was the most fun part of the project. We did not exactly have a script to follow, so we just resorted to improvisation. Each of us basically just did what felt right in the given situation. The people controlling the robots made up a random situation for the robots to go through. The robots acted ‘robot-y’ throughout these situations. The actual performance was a rough summation of what we rehearsed. If I were to be very picky about the performance, I would say that we all were a little stiff on stage and could have let loose a bit. Either that or there could have been more of a contrast between robots and the humans, making the humans more lively and the robots more stiff as if they were being controlled.