Mira and I talked about exploring how simple behaviors (movements) can give an object personality.

At first I was thinking about my fantasy device, a bag that follows you around, and how it would inevitably become like a child or pet and would need some simple code of behavior to understand how to follow somebody around.

Mira was interested in animating ordinary things and exploring the emotion or ideas that their behaviors evoke with something like a performance in mind. We also talked about making clothing move.

I keep thinking about the repurposed disposed ikea furniture that Adam Lassy turned into interactive furniture. I saw it at the spring show last year, and I was struck with how much empathy and emotion the Ikea chair evoked while just rolling around the floor.

I stole this video from his website:

[wpvideo Vfta0L2j]

We want to create an animated ordinary object and give it enough behaviors to be able to follow us around, and when engaged, dance with us.

Here are some examples of movement giving something ordinary character from Pixar:

[wpvideo lwArOkb5]

The famous Pixar lamp:

[wpvideo XKzOb0YQ]

I found an animation article by John Lasseter where he talks about animating everyday objects in a way that suggests they have a personality. Animals and people look, think, then act, while objects controlled by something else move unexpectedly. He recommends animating first the eyes, then the head, then the body motion in that sequence to create the illusion that the object is thinking before doing.

It is probably not exactly relevant to what we will do, but it is really interesting.

Here is the text by John Lasseter:

"THE THINKING CHARACTER

When animating characters, every movement, every action must exist for a reason. If a 

character were to move about in a series of unrelated actions, it would seem obvious that 

the animator was moving it, not the character itself. All the movements and actions of a 

character are the result of its thought process. In creating a "thinking character," the 

animator gives life to the character by connecting its actions with a thought process. Walt 

Disney said, "In most instances, the driving forces behind the action is the mood, the 

personality, the attitude of the character—or all three. Therefore, the mind is the pilot. We 

think of things before the body does them."

To convey the idea that the thoughts of a character are driving its actions, a simple trick

is in the anticipation; always lead with the eyes or the head. If the character has eyes, the 

eyes should move first, locking the focus of its action a few frames before the head. The 

head should move next, followed a few frames later by his body and the main action. The 

eyes of a character are the windows to its thoughts; the character’s thoughts are conveyed 

throught the actions of its eyes.

If the character has no eyes, such as an inanimate object like a Luxo lamp, it is even more 

important to lead with the head. The number of frames to lead the eyes and head depends 

on how much thought precedes the main action. The animator must first understand a 

character’s thought process for any given action. Consider a character wanting to snatch 

some cheese from a mouse trap; the eyes will lead the snatch by quite a bit because this is 

a big decision. The character needs time to think, "...Hmm...This looks tricky, is this 

cheese really worth it or is it just processed American cheese food?...Oh what the heck...," 

he decides, and snatches the cheese.

Conversely, if the action is a character ducking to miss a low flying sheep, the anticipation 

of the eyes leading the action should be just a couple of frames. "What the...," and the next 

thing, he is spitting wool out of his mouth.

The only time that the eyes or head would not lead the action would be when an external 

force is driving the character’s movements, as opposed to his thought process. For 

example, if that character was hit in the back by the low flying sheep, the force of the 

impact would cause the body to move first, snapping the head back and dragging it behind 

the main action of the body.

EMOTION

The personality of a character is conveyed through emotion and emotion is the best indicator 

as to how fast an action should be. A character would not do a particular action the same way 

in two different emotional states. When a character is happy, the timing of his movements 

will be faster. Conversely, when sadness is upon the character, the movements will be slower. 

An example of this, in Luxo Jr., is the action of Jr. hopping. When he is chasing the ball, he is 

very excited and happy with all his thoughts on the ball. His head is up looking at the ball, the 

timing of his hops are fast as there is very little time spent on the ground between hops 

because he can’t wait to get to the ball.

After he pops the ball, however, his hop changes drastically, reflecting his sadness that the object 

of all his thoughts and energy just a moment ago is now dead. As he hops off, his head is down, 

the timing of each hop is slower, with much more time on the ground between hops. Before, he 

had a direction and a purpose to his hop. Now he is just hopping off to nowhere. 1

To make a character’s personality seem real to an audience, he must be different than the other 

characters on the screen. A simple way to distinguish the personalities of your characters is 

through contrast of movement. No two characters would do the same action in the same way. 

For example, in Luxo Jr., both Dad and Jr. bat the ball with their heads. Yet Dad, who is larger 

and older, leans over the ball and uses only his shade to bat it. Jr., however, is smaller, younger, 

and full of energy, he whacks the ball with his whole shade, putting his whole body into it. 1"

Some ideas we discussed/thought about are a hat, a cup, pants, a bag, an amorphous blob.

I made this collage, and I’m only putting it here as a warning to the world, that unless it is animated nicely or given nice movements, an object isn’t necessarily going to have personality.

[wpvideo XiwWVPCM]

Movement we are into:

waves, as in Reuben Margolin sculpture.

[wpvideo suePJAYc]

[wpvideo SuuMEvJ3]

Technical Difficulties:

It seemed easy but a bit of research revealed that making a robot follow you is not (easy). One robot I read about had camera tracking, sonar range finders, GPS, and GIS. It was an assistive robot for the visually impaired, so it had to be very accurate and adaptive, but reading about the complexity of making a computer see or hear is sad to me.

One solution I found was to take the processing of vision/senses out of the robot and equip it with laser rang finders and RFID sensors responding to rfid information in the environment. This requires creating a readable environment, but is an interesting solution to the problem.

Another robot was responsive to sound, by triangulating the origin of the sound based on three microphones. This would work well with our whistling idea. It seems doable except for the microphone hardware, but these people did it: The people that did it.

Tracking the  the robot’s position, the robot’s destination, determining the robot’s motion control, and if/ that it can read its environment are all issues that can require different systems. In our instance, I think we can eliminate most of these issues, because its position and destination can be relative to the person, and it doesn’t need to know its environment, because its completely dependent on the person. It can sense the person using an RFID tag and a proximity detector.

If RFID sensors can give the distance from the tag, then its perfect. The person can wear the tag and remain in contact (within a certain distance) with the robot. I found one example that used something similar to triangulation to determine the direction of the RFID reading: “A self-contained direction sensing radio frequency identification (RFID) reader is developed employing a dual-di- rectional antenna for automated target acquisition and docking of a mobile robot in indoor environments.”

If the RFID sensors only say they detect a certain tag, which would usually be the case, then another way may be to also have a proximity sensor or several angled ones, that are consulted for the closest object only when an RFID tag is detected by the RFID sensor, identifying the closest object as the person. The proximity then determines if the thing goes in that direction faster, slower, etc.  Another way may be to have several RFID sensors with different ranges so if a tag is detected in one and not the other the thing can be told to slow down or speed up based on knowing that it needs to be in the range of the middle RFID reader (for example).

Conclusion:

I’m really interested in giving things life and making them dance, but I have understood that it can be really difficult, so I am open to other applications of this idea of animating ordinary things. But I am still interested and willing to work on it.