JIANHAO MA
Staring At You
Category: Interactive Installation Art, a project of Creative Computing Class
Span: November 2019
Position: Member of a team of three
Responsibilities: Coming up with ideas, programming
I did this Halloween project with my classmates in the Creative Computing class. The goal was to make a skeleton that turns its head and follows the people passing by. From brainstorming to the actual presentation, the whole process took three weeks. The mechanism is not hard to explain. We used four major things to complete the installation: the webcam, the computer, an Arduino, and a servo. On the computer, we wrote a program with javascript and ran it on the P5 editor. The program detects the person's nose and returns the position value, then calculates a value of angle for the servo to rotate. And the Arduino that was paired with the computer read that value and controlled the servo to rotate. Last, glue a skeleton that is light enough onto the servo, and we had a haunted skeleton that looks like it's watching you. For detailed steps regarding thought processing and programming, I linked thorough documentation I wrote when it was almost done.