The straightforward way to design an animation system for HERB is to use a fixed pose-to-pose design as illustrated by the following image.   The disadvantages of this approach are: a. It’s a fixed graph so in order to replay a sequence, you have to go back through a set of unwanted poses. Additionally, the […]

Part of our research and development process is to get data for the potential audience and users to iterate our designs. Of course there are several ways to achieve this but Playtesting or User Testing is one of the most common ones. For our project we did a playtest in which we collected data from […]

We keep advancing with our development proccess and one of the most important parts of this project are rehearsals. A couple of weeks ago we had our second series of rehearsals. This time we were able to test the play with HERB itself. After this rehearsal we got a huge amount of insights and feedback […]

The animation pipeline is one of the most crucial elements of our development process. The animations constitue the main input for the robot to generate corporal movements with emotional intention. On the other hand, those animations must be dynamically integrated on the interface we are building. To achieve high polished but flexible animations we had […]

One of the goals of Bowtie beyond transforming HERB itself into an actor is to completely transform the acting stage and find new angles from this kind of performances. When something like a robot takes the role of the main actor, several things start changing. One of the most relevant changes is the way other […]

A big part of the Bowtie development process relies on technology. As you may know, our main goal with this project is to create a flexible and robust interface that would let an operator push certain pre-composed animations to Herb, in order to make him perform the role of an actor. In the process of […]

Part of our research in Bowtie is trying to understand and interpret the best possible emotions for a robot in order to create the most optimal human robot interaction. As part of this process we executed an Observation of Human Expression that we could use as emotional references to design our animations. We also wanted […]

Over this semester we have been doing a good amount of research on concepts and user interfaces that can helps us to create a better final product. Our idea is to create a flexible, dynamic and intuitive interface that exports animations to HERB. The interface we are trying to develop is something that gives the […]

The last week we had a Rehearsal session of the play that HERB is going to interpret in April 30th. In this meeting we also had the pleasure of talking with the Director, Sam French, and show him our progress in the UI Mockups that are a pretty close image of what we may have […]