My idea is Sam’s idea from early in the year.

The spotlight is in the middle of the room, and it has 3 directional microphones and a 360 degree motion tracking system. This will allow the robot to triangulate the loudest point in the room, and track the position of the fastest moving thing in the room. This is the most complicated part of the performance, but hopefully not the complete center of attention.

The Spotlight is able to track the “most interesting” thing in the room based on some combination of sound triangulation and motion tracking, and subsequently blast it with light.

The other robots in the system are essentially “dancing” robots with a brightness sensor somewhere on it. I use dancing through this explanation, but that the motion could really be anything. It’s unimportant how many dancing robots there are along the walls of the room. The dancing robots would be shy robots, and would dance more and more vigorously so long as the light on them is the ambient amount of light in the room, but stop dancing if the spotlight shines on it.

The main point of the installation is to put people in a space where initially the robots are interacting with each other, and then they could easily take the attention of the spotlight by saying anything or moving quickly.

Generally people in an art show will be shy or embarrassed when the focus of attention points to them, so the idea is to show that people will be just as much at the mercy of the Spotlight as the robots along the walls.