Drawing pictures with cars on walls
Team 2 - Matt Britton, Faith Clayton, Alex Crichton, Carlos Gil
Concept
The concept behind Verti-gogh is drawing pictures with wall-drawing
robots on any vertical surface. This can be done collaboratively,
programmatically, and all in a fun-to-watch way.
Motivation
This idea is motivated by taking ordinary electronics and having them do
something above and beyond what was originally intended for them. For us
it's artistically rendering a picture where the rendering itself is just
as fascinating as the result.
Experimentation and Testing Plan
One of the main concerns is going to be tracking the cars via the webcam.
In order to evaluate this, we'll apply the following analyses:
- Run the cars in both a light and a dark room, determining how much
ambient light is necessary
- Vary the degrees of brightness of colors on the car.
- Vary the colors drawn on screen to see if they interfere with
tracking the cars
- Vary the amount of area the webcam is viewing which is proportional
to the distance to the viewing area
- Vary the material upon which the image is being projected to see if
interference arises for different textures
Description
A user will be able to control a set of RC cars through a tablet or internet
connected device. The cars will be controlled real-time and they will interact
with different games on the wall.
From a technical perspective, the input (in this case an iPad) will be
sent to a Raspberry Pi (rpi); at the same time images from the camera are
processed on the rpi. From here the controls are
sent to the RC cars via an IR transmitter. The cars' actual
locations are tracked via the webcam (fed back into the rpi) and used to
interact with our game. Finally images are fed and displayed by the projector
from the rpi.
Requirements
We have the following requirements for the outcome of our project:
- Users can consistently interact with our cars from a web connected device
- Any action on behalf of the user will cause a noticable reaction
from the cars controlled in under 3 seconds
- Our game software will interact and be responsive to the cars
