The Beating Blob

The Beating Blob mimics the muscular beating of the human heart. The sculptural arms inside The Beating Blob move faster as more people enter the Carnegie Mellon University fitness facilities.

Designed to mimic the pulsing, flexing, and stretching of a muscle, The Beating Blob mimics the physical activity of the people in the space it represents. Rather than use light, sound, text, or other outputs to represent the number of people using the fitness facilities, we chose muscular-like movement as the most appropriate method of showing passersby how many people are using the gym.

The fitness facilities on the Carnegie Mellon University campus are hidden inside of the upper level of the UC Cohon building. When intending to use the fitness facilities, there is no ability of patrons to detect whether or not those facilities are overcrowded at the moment. Considering that the weight room and the cardio rooms are extremely small with limited windows, one must travel across campus, through hallways, and up staircases to the front door of the fitness rooms to detect when it is too busy to enter. This is a long journey just to find out one needs to come back at a later time or date.  There is also no parking lot, large windows, or other visual indicators that people normally use to see how busy a location is indoors.  We wanted to solve this problem with reactive architecture and create an indicator of how busy the gym was to people who were far enough away from the gym to plan their access of it. 

Inspiration came from several sources, one of which is the D-Tower (NOX, 1999 - 2004) in the Dutch city of Doetinchem. The D-Tower changes color based on responses to a website questionnaire. The colors represent the collected emotions of the people responding on the website, showing either love, hate, happiness, or fear in real-time. 

Early on we decided our peripheral display would have a beating and pulsing movement, but we were unsure of what form we wanted it to take. We considered a display that could stand on a table or take the form of a ceiling lamp or even be affixed as a series of moving tiles on the outside of a building.

We ultimately decided to build a small functioning prototype of a larger sculpture that would be outdoors in a centralized location such as in the middle of the Cut on the CMU campus.

We first considered solenoids as the driver of our sculpture's movement. We quickly learned solenoids only allow control of the length of time between pulses, not the speed. We then considered using servo motors with customized pieces for translating movement of the servo into linear motion. We gained inspiration from the Automino modular construction kit (pictured above).

We translated that into our own design (pictured above), which we iterated on until we found the right design.

The central spine of the structure is made up of a wooden dowel. The wooden boxes are connected through a drilled hole in each box and are freely able to rotate around the dowel with their own movement into unpredictable configurations.

The data used by the sculpture is captured by a camera within the fitness facilities. We used a program called openTSPS to extract the number of people in each area of the gym. The areas of the gym were broken up into four quadrants, each quadrant mapping to an arm of the sculpture. We then wrote a program in Processing to translate the number of people in a specific quadrant into the speed of a the respective arm. As the number of people in a given area increases, the speed of the arm also increases.

The final prototype needed some kind of cover to complete the appearance of a blob. Our intention was to have a very tight material that wrapped around the entire sculpture. We imagined a latex-like covering that wrapped around the sculpture like an air-tight, semi-transparent skin. We purchased a lycra fabric at a local reuse store and found that the lycra was too strong for the servo motors to push the arms through. The servos were not powerful enough to move the arms. We therefore had to make the lycra cover fairly loose. In further iterations, we would focus on transforming the bag-like covering into a tightly wrapped, flexible skin.

This peripheral display assignment was a lesson in creating reactive spaces, creating media architecture, using computer vision, programming in Processing, learning Arduino, testing the limitations of solenoids and servos, and practicing basic sewing.