I’ve been wrecking my tired mushy brain for weeks thinking about a fun and interesting project to do for a final project. I became very fascinated with this iris mechanism (pic below), which I first saw a print of at Maker Faire this year. The way it moves is so simple and elegant, so I decided to incorporate it. At first I imagined a field of these reacting to some external stimulus. While it may not be hard to physically build 50 of these, programming them would probably pose a huge problem I’m not sure I’m ready to tackle on my own. So I scaled back…
The Idea So Far…
I’m imagining an infinit game with a physical board and processing projection. The vertical game board will have 10 of these irises staggered at the bottom. The irises will open and close by the use of servos working behind the game board. A processing sketch will be projected onto the board with circles/buttons in positions corresponding to each iris.
Particles/balls/objects will fall from the top. The objective of the game is to catch these objects by opening the irises. To open an iris, the player presses the button in processing, which triggers the servos. Each iris will only stay open for 3 seconds then closes again. If the object hits an open iris, player scores a point (iris lights up/blinks and the button in processing blinks). If it hits a closed iris, it will bounce off and change its vector. At that point, the player still has the chance to catch it by opening one of the irises in the next row. If the object is never caught, it falls off the screen and disappears.
It’s a simple idea right now, not fully developed yet, but sounds like fun.
Another idea I was toying with is working with the Magic Ball. I thought about actuating maybe 3 large ones (made of mylar) with muscle wires and installing LEDs inside them. Maybe it would react to external stimulus or also to a processing projection. The end mood would be like an organism that breathes (by movement of muscle wire and dimming of LEDs) or grows and shrinks depending on how many processing particles is being fed to it. Also, half baked idea so far.
