i-lamp animatronics lamp

Today, for the usual Friday column dedicated to lighting design, we offer a particular project that goes beyond the pure design, a complex robotic lamp created by three students of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand: South African Adam Ben-Dror, in collaboration with Joss Doggett and Shanshan Zhou. Outwardly, it looks like an ordinary desk lamp, but “i-lamp” is not just that, it’s a lamp that has abandoned its primary function evolving into a kind of robotic friend with animal movements, designed to interact with the surrounding environment and search for the presence of faces and people. An exploration of the expressive and behavioral potential of computed robotics that, through the use of Arduino open-source single-board microcontroller and Processing programming language, is capable of giving a dynamic range of behaviors to the electronics, movements and interactions able to generate a series of emotional sympathies. If you are intrigued and want to see it in action, below the photo gallery you will find the video that shows the movements and the curious and amusing reactions of the lamp. Awesome!