Karl D.D. Willis.

Shadow Follower is an experimental drawing robot designed to follow the shadow created by your hand or any other object. The original idea stems from Herbert Simon's metaphor of an ant walking on a beach. Although when looking at an ant from above their path seems very complex, Simon suggests it stems from simple local interactions such as 'see a rock, turn left'. If we imagine that the rock could be your foot or mine, and replace the ant with some device like a robot, then that is essentially 'interactivity'. My interest is in finding the richness, complexity, and creativity in such interactions.

BeatBox is a prototype toy that turns the surface of your desk into a beat making instrument. It uses contact microphones to detect different sounds from the desk surface, and a simple software patch to trigger audio samples. I often find myself tapping away on my desk, and this is a fun and simple way to experiment with those rhythms.

Bubble Sequencer is a prototype interactive toy for children, which uses the natural rise of bubbles through liquid to control and trigger musical tones. By encouraging a state of play, Bubble Sequencer offers users the chance to interact and create sound sequences in a free and open manner. The user firstly pumps small bubbles into a series of liquid filled pipes, each assigned a tone. As the bubbles float upwards, they pass a number of sensors set to on or off by the user. Depending on the state of the sensor, a musical tone is triggered as the bubble passes by. The interaction builds upon the relationship between the steady rise of bubbles and the time based sequencing of music. While Bubble Sequencer ...