Final Project Technical Overview: Haenyeo

The volcano sculpture and objects were fabricated with clay. A clear acrylic panel was laser cut to fit on top of the enclosure, and the movement of the fabric was generated using two DC motors mounted on 3D printed fan guards. The structure holding the enclosure was built from wood panels.

The installation is controlled by an Arduino Mega that lives inside the volcano sculpture. It connects to 25 Neopixels embedded in the volcano and fades the light in and out based on user interaction. It also connects to two RFID readers that are attached to two headphones. When one of the RFID tags from the objects is scanned, the Arduino sketch (written in C++) recognizes the object and the headphones in use and sends that information to our Processing sketch (written in Java) via serial communication. The Processing sketch, in turn, starts playing the corresponding sound track on the headphones via bluetooth and the corresponding video footage on the screen, which is projected onto the bottom of the installation. We allow two users interacting with the exhibit at the same time; when both headphones are playing stories, the projection displays video footage in split screen mode, as shown above.