UWW310 Technology & the Arts

The truly surprising part about the LEGO Movie, which is far more entertaining than it has any right to be, is how it looks

the whole movie looks like it's actually made of stop-motion LEGO bricks.

The whole movie really is stop motion. Sort of. Okay, Internet, slow down. Technically speaking, a huge majority of the film was made on a computer by the animation team at Animal Logic. But. But. That CG animation was created according to the rules of classic stop motion. McKay explains that in order to achieve motion blur or certain effects, they would crib cheats and camera tricks from the stop-motion playbook. "We set ourselves up with a bunch of rules and limitations with how we animated the thing, because in CG you could do anything. You have 15,000 explosions and their arms can bend and stretch but we said, 'No, we're only going to move these figures in the seven points of articulation that a minifig can move in.'"

This robot drum arm comes from Georgia Tech, and was originally designed as a way to help a drummer who had lost an arm.

Here, the drum arm augments an existing drummer. While the user in question is wearing a headband with sensors, that part of the project isn’t ready yet. Instead, the robot arm is drumming of its own accord, with some awareness of what the human is doing. It listens, and it plays along.

The robotic arm is smart for a few reasons. First, it knows what to play by listening to the music in the room. It improvises based on the beat and rhythm. For instance, if the musician plays slowly, the arm slows the tempo. If the drummer speeds up, it plays faster. Another aspect of its intelligence is knowing where it’s located at all times, where the drums are, and the direction and proximity of the human arms. When the robot approaches an instrument, it uses built-in accelerometers to sense the distance and proximity. On-board motors make sure the stick is always parallel to the playing surface, allowing it to rise, lower or twist to ensure solid contact with the drum or cymbal. The arm moves naturally with intuitive gestures because it was programmed using human motion capture technology.

In the 20th Century, humanity finally built and strutted up its mechanical ladder to the heavens to discover the space above our skies; the first step of a grand and beautiful journey that will become the thread of history books to come, widening its place in the narrative as we ourselves evolve in knowledge and know-how.