MANDALA - Process

Breath tracking:

Using Open CV to track the breath, Eulerian Video Magnification amplifies all motion in the webcam stream. What you see in this video is not a deep breath, but a magnified version of a normal breath. Then the average optical flow is used to get the vertical movement vector. If the magnitude of the average optical flow vector is too large it is thrown out. Only when the person is very still, will it start tracking, assuming it is the breath. Then some basic physics are used to match the breath velocity.

When MANDALA syncs with a person's breath it looks like this:

Sections: The wooden circle is designed in sections. Each time we exhibit the piece it will be configured slightly differently. One time the pieces will be arranged all the way together forming a circle, another time a little bit apart, another time with the bottom sections separated out, as if they are falling down from the circle, another time the entire circle will appear exploded, and so forth and so on in countless variations.

Here is the design for the different sections and a video of a prototype mounted on a wall. The inner structures of the final design are all aluminum sheets cut with a water-jet. Each section is individually mounted and contains its own ciruit board. Note: The final outer wood parts will be birch, not the black scrap plywood used for this prototype.

To properly place the sections on the wall, a projection mapping application was created that allows the piece to be displayed, with exact dimensions and proportions, on the wall. For development purposes, this outline was sketched on the wall:

Circuit Board Prototype: I’ve designed and produced a circuit board that can drive 16 motors and networks with multiples of itself to drive the 300+ motors for the piece (there are 23 circuit boards in total for the entire piece).

Renders:

Development Images: