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Interactive Solar System

In recent years has been given much interest in the development of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) applications such as the Microsoft World Wide Telescope in which the person uses his hands and body so as to explore the universe [1], or a planetary orbit simulator [2] to which both are used to propose and design an Interactive Solar System. Therefore, we considered to integrate similar interactive gestures so as to provide better understanding on the planetary motion (Video 1).

Hardware camera is based on the Kinect sensor which it is working on Ubuntu 12.12 by using openNI library on processing.

References

[1] Exploring the universe via Xbox Kinect, available at

http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/156371/exploring-universe-xbox-kinect

[2] Planetary Orbit Simulator Available at

http://astro.unl.edu/naap/pos/animations/kepler.swf

+ Light Tracking Robot

For Light Tracking Robot Project, students will build their own biologically inspired robot critter (Figure 1) that mimics this behavior phototaxis – movement toward (or away from) a light source. It is fully based on [1] with with few adaptations such as the material available in Mexican's devices stores.

Reference

[1] Ben Finio, Ph.D., Build a Light-Tracking Robot Critter. Available at

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_ideas/Robotics_p012.shtml?from=Blog#summary