Description

Shayne Liu

Intent:

This project does a great deal of research in the fields of cognitive psychology, games studies, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary sciences provide explanations for why people project sympathy and emotion into objects and systems that obviously do not possess the capacity for feeling or returning such behavior. My intent is to do a research on ideas of synthetic psychology, and to get a physical motion propelled by electronic control. Through this research, I will be getting more cognitive of psychology, learning of vehicles’ working, and an approach to electronic and physical work.

Emotion:

The emotion has been chosen to set to my character is annoyance. Annoyance is an unpleasant mental state that is characterized by such effects as irritation and distraction from one’s conscious thinking. It can lead to emotions such as frustration and anger. The reason I chose annoyance to be my basic concept is because that people does strong or particular activities when they get annoyed. In addition, annoyances have often been made the subjects of humor and amusement. In many comedic double acts humor comes from the annoyance that the comic’s actions create for the comic foil.

Behavior:

For a returning behavior of the emotion – “annoyance”, my character moves its head to left or right side when people gets close to it. Nevertheless, this behavior is what people always do when they get annoyed. The mood of my character is “don’t touch me”, and then trying to make a motion like that is my first job for the installation of my character. I have experimented to get best angles of my character’s head, to present the basic activities of “annoyance” and “don’t touch me”.

Character:

The design of my character is simple as a pig-like object. I used a big plastic ball to be my character’s body, and a small one for its head. The reason of doing a concept of my character something like a pig is because a pig has a relation to my first project – a lazy pig with some food in a room. Additionally, pig is a lazy animal that doesn’t really want to do much activity, in this way, a pig could easily get annoyed.

Process:

The first step for making this project was to connect all the parts on to an Arduino board and keep experimenting on the servo’s turning angles. Two mini photocells and a servo for the basic signal have been used as input and output. Programming on Arduino software is similar to a processing program; I used an example of servo from Arduino Sketch Library, and have been helped by Tiago. I then basically did a math on the angles of an output to the servo, to get the best angles of the character’s head’s turning position.

Putting all the parts together is a hard job because the big empty plastic ball is just a right size of space for all the parts to stay in. I stuck all the parts tight into the big plastic ball with tape and super glue. Afterwards, I painted the surfaces of two balls to a white color. I then stuck the character’s two eyes on to its face, and made its hands by straws.

The result:

The finished object is slightly different to the original plan, but it’s related to my initial concept and pretty much achieved my basic expectation of the movements based on the emotion – “annoyance”. However, the whole process of doing this project is quite fun and I have been learning lots on the study of psychology and work of vehicles.

Before the installation, I meant to paint my character into black and white, however I found that it’s not bad to be a whole white body.

The eyes can be easily sticked onto its face, I then made its two hands by straws.