Marco Lurati

Black Dragon

Interactive environnement installation

Abstract

The project consists of a small-scale prototype representing a large ceiling installation designed for a big circus company show to entertain the audience in the lobby area. The installation consists of a long-limbed wavy surface hanging on the audience and moving like a river.S

The triangular texture maintains the industrial heritage of the building for which the installation has been designed. The surface is illuminated to highlight the shapes and movement of the surface itself.

The audience can interact with the surface and bring it alive thanks to the physical interface composed of buttons positioned under the surface on its all length. Each segment of the interface does move the correspondent segment of the surface.

Datas

year

2014

scope

MAIND SUPSI, interactive environment course

team

Federico Lameri

teacher

Bill Keays

process

The prototype works fully, manually and physically, without any electronic actuator or computer. In the following video, the building process is shown. The whole board counted 209 manual actuators, so the "work chain" to build it has been quite intensive, but I loved it!

The building process has been quite tricky, mainly because of the surface. To have a perfectly aligned pattern with the proper distance between the Plexiglas triangles and to allow the surface to move freely, we first had to build a mask to ensure the positioning of the fabric of the triangles. The second step was to cover the Plexiglas sheet with double-face tape before laser-cutting the triangles so that everything was clean-cut just once. The result has been very satisfying.

  • Lasercutting the plexiglass triangle with already the double sided tape to gain some time later
  • Using a jig to perfectly align the plexiglass triangles on the fabric cloth
  • Removal of the jig, the trick worked
  • Everything is perfectly aligned
  • Dill column used to have perpendicular holes
  • The mechanism of the push buttons with the stop metal piece that stop them popping out from the surface
  • The mountage of the pistons, 209 of them
  • First piece of the rubber bands support is glued
  • All the pistons with the rubber band inserted and ready to be mounted
  • The fabric cloth with the triangles is glued on the end of each piston with hot glue
  • The camera is connected to the projector that projects on the ceiling of the room to simulate the final effect

skills

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