In 2016 TRIAD produced a hand full off interactive exhibits for Siemens‘ stage at the Wind Energy Hamburg. I mainly worked on the the wind turbine cube, a kinetic sculpture with transparent oled info screens. The kinetic sculpture was moved by a seperate motion controller that was controlled by a vvvv master which also showed the video content on the four screens. This could either be in auto mode or controlled by a tablet remote.
The most complicated task was to find the right timing for the motion and the distribution of the multiple movies independently on different screens. I had to patch up an animation engine within vvvv that was taking care of that timing while showing the movie content for us to finetune the physical movement to the movies.
Aditionally after relocation you never knew which screen was which and if you did something wrong while hanging the models or if the motor controller overheated and shut down the shiney 3d printed models even could fall. That happened once, luckily with the dummy weights during tests but we wanted to prevent that from happening again.
So in the end the vvvv backend became a giantic monster of interactive timeline state machine with debugging tools and failsaves on top. Next kinetic sculpture will hopefully be something more generic and less fragile in terms of motion control.
2016, continued
TRIAD Berlin,
Siemens
