This week we looked more into our chosen topic of climate crisis and biodiversity.
We were really interested in having a specific animal species to bring awareness to, so we did some planning on a miro board together.
We researched and found sources for example projects we were interested in, as well as narrowing down animal species. We researched further into cicadas, moths, beavers and squirrels.
Eventually, we went with moths as the group as a whole realised that moths would be easier to develop on the creative tech side. We decided (for now) that having a mechanical moth that can be controlled using a position on hand tracking would be interesting, as well as maybe adding a projector that has more moths.
(credit to Ava for the above diagram)
We are still debating which type of moth that we want to inspire our mechanical moth on, however we did think of one species of moth where we there are some “eyes” on its wings. We thought that this would be a good place to put the camera to detect hand position movement. We had a plan where we thought that the position of the ML5js hand tracking could dictate if the wings of the moth were up or down.
However, after I made a sketch I realised that the camera would be obscured if the wing moved up when placed on the top of the wings.
As a solution we could either:
- place the camera inside the edge of the wing. However since the material of the wings will most likely be fabric, this may not be a good idea because of the seams.
- place the camera in the head or eye of the head of the moth. However, this all depends on the size of the moth.
The camera would be more difficult to place within the body as this is where the cam and follow will be that cause the wing movement, so that isn’t really an option. I discussed these worries with one member of my group but I’ll speak more with the rest of my group next week.
I also had an idea that the moth could be facing towards the ceiling, and attached to a fake log. Inside this log we could store a camera or any other sensors and we would have more room to do so.
Also to add from last week, my drag and dropping animal creation does work with pngs! However, it can only be dragged from the origin point (the top left corner) of the png. With more testing I could figure out a way to fix this, maybe by seeing if my collision library from my last project would work with it.
However, for now, I think that concludes the feasibility testing. I don’t think I will have a way to tie this into the current project, but it was nice to test anyway.
This week went well! We did so much research, next week though we will discuss or throught process as a group more to try and troubleshoot logistical concerns for this project.
weekly reading
I did look at the weekly reading this week! I didn’t read it at the start of the week, so I couldn’t use these learnings for the whole week. However, it was beneficial to look through as it let me know we were on the right track. Reading it through, it emphasized gathering reliable sources before diving too far in, which is helping us a lot as we can draw upon our research sources later down the line when we are implementing ideas.