Technical details
The Luminescent Tentacles is a scalable kinetic surface system that is inspired by tentacles of sea anemones. By waving a hand, 256 actuators as tentacles bend softly and the top of actuator glows. Each actuator is actuated by three shape-memory alloys called BioMetals. The actuator can bend in six directions by the combination of three control currents. To precisely control a large number of actuators simultaneously, the system utilizes one microcontroller per actuator for distributed processing. To communicate with the PC application, our system adopts the DMX512 which supports a daisy chain. The distributed processing system with the DMX512 creates a scalable platform. By the control program interacts with fluid dynamics and Kinect, actuators can behave like a water ripple. The sound reaction to the hand movement creates music via a software synthesizer. The goal of this project is to realize the representation of an aesthetic kinetic art similar to the waving tentacles of sea anemones under the sea. Applications include a kinetic art, ambient display, and animatronics.Movies
