After The Blast

AFTER THE BLAST is a play by Zoe Kazan that ran at the Lincoln Center. The play is set in a dystopian future. We created a robot that could respond to performers' voices through responsive lighting. The robot could also interact through independent movement of its head, arms, body.

My Role

I was the Experience Designer and Creative Technologist on this project. I designed the robot’s on stage interaction and built and coded the physical computing components.

The robot can move forward, reverse, lift each arm individually, and turn left and right 360 degrees. By having the core movements of the robot controlled by a technical staff member offstage, this cut time, cost, and potential technical reliability that would have resulted from focusing on coding these interactions into the robot.

How It Works

We built in a substantial amount of functionality into the robot with consideration to ease of control as well as budgetary constraints. The robot is designed to be controlled off stage via remote control, allowing it to seem autonomous and more “alive”, mimicking AI, but giving it more versatility to interact with the actors and really perform to the audience.

Experience Flow

Our goal was to create a simple robot that could connect with actors and audience members by conveying emotion and empathy through simple interactions, using minimal technology that was easily accessible.

I started by researching robots that were on the consumer market as well as more advanced options to get a sense of functionality, style, and ease of use. From there I mapped out all of the basic interactions the robot could potentially perform and narrowed it down to the interactions that were simple and would have the biggest impact for the audience.

Technology

I researched the best options for the technology. I focused on a microcontroller that was lightweight, yet had the processing power needed. Cutting physical weight from the robot was essential wherever we could as it needed to be easily transported and stored before and after each show.

I used the Adafruit Trinket Mini Microcontroller with a boost board to allow the batteries to be easily recharged between performances. I used a 60 Neopixel ring that had individually addressable rgb LEDs. The Neopixel ring was coded to respond to sound and change color from yellow to blue when "speaking." Besides the ability to move on stage, the changing colors gave the robot an additional way to emote when interacting on stage.