Chebbomba!!

Video of a old Arduino project i did a year ago with some friends in one day and one night at the Jam Session organized by the Physical Computing Lab in Milan during 12 and 13 of November 2011.It's a bomb made out of felt with an ID12 RFID reader inside and 3 LEDs that come out of the fuse. Each LED has a different color that matches each of the player's glove. The purpose of the game is to pass the bomb when a LED turns on and the device recognize if the receiver has the same color of the LED by reading a RFID tag embed inside every glove. If the bomb is not "defused" in time, it plays a theme from star wars. Nerds to the bone.


Chebbomba was made by:Stefano Airoldi,Paolo Alborghetti,Davide Caprioli,Alessandro Casmirri,Matteo Loglio,Giulia Pretti...

Lot of fun!!




Chebbomba! from matteo on Vimeo.

[FF]

Flying Foliage is a project ,developed with a friend of mine (Marco Carrara), for INNATURE2 idea-competition. We had to propose a cutting-edge concept for a new model of natural center.The  project is about a natural center situated in California (US) in the sequoia park.In this park the users find the oldest living being on earth. Enormous trees and amazing landscapes. The aim of the project is build a relationship with existing trees and give the users a new way of looking at nature.The lightweight-building is mobile. With the help of inflatables baloons, it can slowly fly and reach the top of the trees. In this way users can observe this macro-ecology form a non-human scale and point of view.While doing this the building doesn’t damage the existing sequoias (not anchoring to them). This continuous movement do not produce noise (as machines or planes do) preserving the silent and the atmosphere that the user find in these places. Anchored to the ground with a cable, the building can get back to the terrain after floating in the air. This produce an interesting contradiction: on one side you find heavy and big trees that transfer their weight to the ground, on the other side the building that float in the air,cable-anchored in tension like pure lightness.
The concept has been developed in 3 days only out of work-time, working during lunchtime and after dinner till the force has been with us (as Yoda would probably say).Given the suuuper-short time, i have to say i'm quite happy of the result.
Unfortunately we only arrived between the 12 finalists.Sigh!|

The Red Queen Hypothesis

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

PROJECT ON PLANE

Another little simple function i've been using in some codes (thanks wolfram mathworld),especially to project agents, running 2D ,on a mesh face.You can use it to project vectors on any planes too,giving at least three points.You will need toxiclibs for this(i know there is a way to do the same thing with toxi rays).


    Vec3D projectOnTriangle3D(Vec3D r, Vec3D a,Vec3D b,Vec3D c) {
    float aa, bb, cc, dd;
    float x1 = a.x;
    float y1 = a.y;
    float z1 = a.z;
    float x2 = b.x;
    float y2 = b.y;
    float z2 = b.z;
    float x3 = c.x;
    float y3 = c.y;
    float z3 = c.z;
    aa = y1 * (z2 - z3) + y2 * (z3 - z1) + y3 * (z1 - z2);
    bb = z1 * (x2 - x3) + z2  *(x3 - x1) + z3  *(x1 - x2);
    cc = x1  *(y2 - y3) + x2 * (y3 - y1) + x3  *(y1 - y2);
    dd = -(x1  *(y2  *z3 - y3  *z2) + x2  *(y3  *z1 - y1 * z3) + x3 * (y1 * z2 - y2  *z1));
    float z = (-dd - aa * r.x - bb * r.y)/cc;
    Vec3D projVec = new Vec3D(r.x, r.y, z);
    return projVec;
  }

TRIPODS INVASION

I have been working on a model of tripod (going on with my studies about agents and embodiment), directly inspired by robotic arms structure.Each tripod is composed by agents and springs.Each arm (like some models of robotic arm) is made up by struts and ties that gives the tripods its ability of self-sustaining. Each node of the arms is composed by agents that have different ability and functions.This combination gives the tripos the capacity of move , seek ,float, jump, stick together and self organize into larger assemblies. The variation of flocking parameters after clustering ,gives control on morphological and structural organization of the assemblies.I have to say that this model is very nice...it reminds me a lot some sci-fi movies about spiderbots invasion!!




TRIPODS INVASION!! from Paolo Alborghetti on Vimeo.