Ardunie
Ardunie is an animatronic head which follows your position with his eyes, when he feels that you have spent time enough with him to consider you his friend (and if he is in the mood) he will try to engage you in a small talk.
Ardunie is an animatronic head which follows your position with his eyes, when he feels that you have spent time enough with him to consider you his friend (and if he is in the mood) he will try to engage you in a small talk.
One of the labs in Physical Computing at Sydney Uni required the development of a device electronically complex to show the understanding in the Arduino platform. I went one step beyond, proposing an interactive sculpture involving a Kinect motion sensor.
Ardunie is thought for an exhibition room, the head uses motion tracking to keep viewer’s attention while in the background attempts to make a phone call to a random number which will be who eventually will be dragged into an unexpected conversation.
The animatronics in fact are a façade to buy time, the real goal of the installation is exploring the relationship and social behaviour of people with human-like devices, a change in behaviour is expected when the viewer discovers that is a real human being who is at the other side of the line, a moment of confusion and embarrassment should occur, since from that point social rules will apply.
The prototype was developed in plywood and programmed using Arduino and Visual Studio with a socket communication in between the microcontroller and the Kinect SDK.
Role
This was a solo project involving, coding, electronics, assembling and woodcraft.
Impact
Ardunie was marked 99/100 and strongly suggested to present to the Dorkbot festival in Sydney.
