Slow Screen

Imagine walking into a three story open air foyer, expecting just a soul-sucking corporate wall in front of you. Instead, you notice a chaotic display of seemingly random “pixels” that behave in oddly pattern-like ways. You can’t figure out exactly what’s going on until you get closer. Before you are close enough to the wall to examine the pixels individually, you notice for a single instant all of the chaos seems to arrange itself into an image, and then immediately divolve again. Intrigued, you approach the wall wondering what kind of effect this could be. 

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You’ve seen many types of displays in your lifetime, but never one that seems to be inherently and simultaneously ordered and chaotic. You notice that all of the pixels in vertical columns are connected, and seem to be masses attached together by torsional springs that are simply oscillating in chaotic ways. There is no evidence of an actuator for any of the masses, although you can’t see what’s above the higher masses. The mystery of how this device functions will stay with you throughout the day, and maybe might even prompt you to research it’s design. 

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This mystery and awe at mechanical systems is the feeling we’re trying to invoke in the users of our product. So many things in our world are similarly amazing, but are mostly hidden from the public eye. By having a display that is strikingly visual, we hope to bring the attention of our users to what’s hidden. 

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We built a proof of concept for this vision. We were able to control five rows of five coupled masses by supplying a forcing function at one motor at the base of each column. We can take an arbitrary state of positions and velocities of the five masses in a column and can get our physical system to that state. Our algorithm will take a target state and return the appropriate forcing function to be executed by a servo coupled to one of the masses via a spring in order to attain that state. The result is then visualized by panels on our rotating masses which reflect red or blue light depending on their angle.