'020 | CMP_vaseField
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Lead Designer; Project Duration: 2 months
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vaseField is an interactive fabrication experiment exploring the connection between gestural movement and remote CAD object creation.
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The primary objective is to record a series of vase compositions as documented medium in Rhino 3D environment. Since each parametric piece is informed by an unrepeatable yet continuous data set, the visualized sequence of the generated vase is analogous to animated frames with controllable playing speed.
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vaseField project exemplifies a potential object customization approach in the future by concretizing the sense of semi-immersive playfulness.
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Brooklyn, USA / 2020 spring (NY Pandemic Era)
[three separate areas of focus]
vaseField incorporates three separate areas of focus: human-object interaction, vase parametric design and computing electronics connection.
The comfortless of the hand movement comes first; measuring proper height and framing area (Max: 18*18cm) of the interaction field are crucial for avoiding unnecessary arm/elbow motion.
Starting from the predefined silhouette template, the vase is designed having three programmable parts, including body pattern (X-axis), rim diameter (Y-axis) and vase height (Z-axis) that enable one vase to easily be distinguished from another.
Electronic wiring part consists of linking trigger pins and echo pins with matched ultrasonic sensors, then connecting the Arduino UNO board with the computer serial port.
In order to get both Arduino IDE and Rhino Grasshopper synchronized on the hosting computer, it is essential to have Firefly plugin as a joining tool, founded by Andy Payne and Jason Kelly Johnson in 2010. The output message from Arduino IDE shown in the Serial Monitor, can be recognized in Grasshopper working environment with the help of Firefly plugin I/O functions. In short, the captured sensor data can be directly adopted by Rhino users at their will. “NewPing” library in Arduino Examples offers source codes tailored for multiple sensors set-up scenarios, organizing data in readable manner and easier to extract for 3D modeling users.
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The final step towards set-up completion combining human-object interaction, vase parametric design and computing electronics is, to construct visual programming in Rhino Grasshopper that makes all the sensory illusion happen.
[working mechanism]
The working mechanism of vaseField is based on constructing a “form-giving field” that facilitates the data collecting process from the hand movement, and subsequently the data are translated and passed into Rhino Grasshopper as input parameters of the form-finding algorithm.
The project is comprised of one physical field setting and two software programs communicating with each other. Three ultrasonic sensors are geared toward X, Y and Z spatial axis and this configuration set the tone for the interaction field.
With all the gather (X, Y, Z) distance data read and transmitted from sensors to Arduino IDE, then eventually to the Rhino Grasshopper environment running on the hosting computer, the serial data are served as parameters to perform corresponding features of the vase.
[renderings]
In summary, vaseField aims to provide a physical space to virtually sculpt or chisel the vase, with your hand!
