What are aspects of your life that you don’t want to become “smart”? (2)

What if there was a hack and your information got leaked? Do you feel that this is a significant enough threat to revise your previous answer? (3)

Do you trust a company to be respectful of your privacy if they have so much information on your life? (2)

Do you trust your government to be respectful of your privacy or do you think the lust of a 1984 world would be too much for it? (3)

In what single field do you look forward to interconnectivity the most? (3)

How has iot already improved your life? (3)

If it takes significant resources to reverse engineer a technology and it is already doing societal good, is it worth reverse engineering for the sake of investigation? (1)

Do you think that technological progress should be shaped by the dreams of artists from the pasts or do you think that society is evolving at such a rapid pace that these ideals are no longer relevant? (1)

Is pure science for the sake of science not of worth to a critical engineer? (1)

This video is dubbed over for improved audio clarity.

Abstract

These days, the line that separates the real world from the internet world is becoming more and more unclear. People may start a conversation online and pick it back up right where they left off when they meet in person. However, there still exists conversations that remain wholly on the internet. These conversations are prone to misunderstandings and rapidly devolves into a spitting war of crass insults. Oddly enough, most of the participants in these conversations-turned-arguments believe that they hold themselves to a higher standard, as though they were more sophisticated and educated than the people talking in the real world.

We shed light on this strange phenomenon by recreating these online conversations into the real world. Pulling threads from reddit.com(a popular ground for online debates), we animate the conversationalists via moving cloth bodies and lights. The robotic sound of the bodies paired with classical orchestral music hopes to highlight the dissonance between what the beings are saying and what they believe themselves to be.

Technology

The project implements an Arduino and two Raspberry Pis to create a call and response system with the Arduino as the master and the Pis as the slaves. The Arduino first triggers the lights and fans through a relay and then sends a signal to the Pi to begin its message. The lights and fans are held on until the Arduino receives a callback from the Pi and switches, activating the other set of electronics. This process repeats until the conversation ends.

The decision to implement in this way was due mainly to the desire to have distinct sound sources so that the voice originates from each of the beings. Offloading the master duties to the Arduino necessary because of the Pi’s inability to sink 5v to turn off the relays.