The Hairy Blob, 800 Ping Pong Balls, and a Mindstorms RoboCam

The Hairy Blob:

At the Hairy Blob exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center last spring, visitors were invited to draw an image of time on a ping pong ball and toss it into a net that was suspended from the ceiling.

 

800 Ping Pong Balls:

What to do with over 800 ping pong balls?

 

How to document 800 three dimensional objects in less than 5 years?

Mindstorms RoboCam:

Our ping pong cam was an NXT Mindstorms robot (which rotated the balls) driven by a laptop that was simultaneously taking pictures. Controlling the robot from an external device was suprisingly difficult. NHK.MindSqualls did the job, but just.

Ping Pong Robo Cam and Laptop setup:

We did the scanning over Thanksgiving weekend at the Roger Brown house in New Buffalo, MI.

The installation:

Intalled at the Mers Micro Museum, a Raspberry Pi drives the display. Some javascript randomly selects from the 800, and then starts a few of them spinning. First it shows a random batch of the day time balls and then a random batch of the night time balls. And so on, indefinitely.

You can also spin the balls online.