Kinetisphere

2012

Interactive sculpture for Google’s annual I/O conference.

Concept

In celebration of the global launch of Google’s Nexus Q—a streaming media player and predecessor of the Chromecast—our team designed and built a unique interactive experience, installed at the Moscone Center for the annual Google I/O conference.

Our concept celebrated the Q’s sculptural form by rendering it at a massive scale: eight feet in diameter, mounted on a ten-foot articulating arm. In a nod to the device’s social dimension, conference attendees were invited to play a collaborative multimedia game, similar to Capture the Flag, in which they used real Nexus Q devices to control the position of the Kinetisphere. The Kinetisphere would tilt toward “planets,” suspended in the room, each with its own melodic, digital soundtrack.

Technology

In building the Kinetisphere, I focused on motion control, safety, Ableton Live integration, Nexus Q firmware integration, and mobile UI development.

The massive payload of the Kinetisphere, combined with the requirement of live, collaborative control, created a unique motion control problem. I used Kuka’s RSI framework to build and tune controllers that allowed participants to control the sphere’s deviation from a base motion path–designed to simulate a floating effect—in real-time.

I integrated safety subsystems including redundant workspace monitoring and “live man” emergency stops.

I built the game logic, modeling the musical “planets” in our virtual 3D workspace, and used the Open Sound Control protocol to communicate real-time position information to Ableton Live, where it influenced a generative soundtrack.

With a custom firmware build from the Nexus Q team, I wrote software to repurpose the Q’s volume dial as a rotary velocity controller for the Kinetisphere’s position.

I also built a native Android application that acted as the game’s UI—rendering the 3D game environment and displaying live updates from the rest of the system.

The rest of our fantastic team solved the hard problems in mechanical engineering, advanced fabrication, and sound design.