We had a meeting to further flesh out what we spoke about in our meeting with Dave. We mainly tried to answer the questions we had noted down during the last meeting.
We had to decide how we would set up our exhibit, originally we had discussed hanging our planets from the ceiling and being able to move them around like that. In the meeting with Dave, he said that it would be nice for the audience to be able to move them wherever they wanted.
We also discussed that we could make a completely fictional planetary system, as that would give us more freedom to create something interesting in terms of sound, visuals and concept. We settled on having a central “earth” planet with a few moons or planets “orbiting” it. This way we could also manipulate the tide more so the effect would be greater.
Yanis and I tasked ourselves with solving how we could set this up. The orbs would have to be able to move, but in one line. But also couldn’t be moved out of that line because the sensor would always have to face the central orb. We thought we could use tracks on the ground to put the spheres on. This seems quite hard though, so we will think more about this system as it’s quite expensive and complicated.
We booked the sensors we are planning to use for the final thing, so we tried to see the best use for them. We concluded that they would need to be moving in a determined trajectory, so pointing towards a central “earth” planet. The data would be more stable, as these sensors are ultra sonic sensors, so would detect an object rather than an inherent location. We did discuss using a GPS sensor, and also booked and tested this out. This was going off of Dave’s suggestion to give the audience more agency to move the planets wherever they would want. The problem that came up with these was the accuracy. It would only measure to a an accuracy of 2 meters, and we were probably going to be working with a much smaller distance.
Yanis and I discussed how we would make our “planet” models while the others were testing out all these sensors and their capabilities. We wanted to use this course as an opportunity to be creative and use different materials. So we concluded that having three “planets” orbiting the central one would give us enough opportunity to do this. We looked into different aesthetics for the “planets”. Because our planetary system is fictional, that meant we could also create our own interpretation of a planet. We really liked the idea of having a hollow sphere with a light inside it. We thought this would look visually striking but also not enough like an actual planet and thus would help clarify how fictional this all is.
