Introduction
What is Life? If a liquid metal droplet can hunt for game, play with companions, and even display personality traits such as shyness, curiosity, brightness and naughtiness, is it alive?
Brainstorming
First we considered how the "personalities" of the metal liquid can be presented individually. Then we contributed our ideas to a central mind map and discussed how to realize them. This process was really exciting and impressive.
Programming
I worked with another team member, Chenrui Xie, and used Arduino to realize the behaviors of these liquid mollusks. We used Arduino Mega board as the brain of each installation, and used relays to control electricity to switch on or off. By comparing the distance information collected by the sensors, the Arduino Leonardo microcontroller board successfully manipulated relays to control the fluid metal to exhibit various traits.
Fabricating
This part was far beyond my imagination. Since the environment of the exhibition was intricate and had many disruptive factors, many programs that ran successfully in isolation failed to work in context. To solve the problem, I classified the environment and visitor behaviors and set up different trigger situations through programming.
Outcome
MetaLife is a series of interactive installations, representing different "personalities" of liquid metal "mollusks". When interacting with the audience, the mollusks present personalities and hopefully provide the audience to wonder what life actually is.
Shyness
Curiousity
Intelligence
Mischief
Reflection
Just as John Lasseter once said, "It’s not the technology that entertains people, it’s what you do with the technology.” The combination of design methodologies and Human Computer Interaction technologies successfully turned the abstract ideas into tangible products. Although currently this project is still confined to laboratories, I believe it can become the first step to exploring a new interaction method or even building a shapeshifting robot.