Isaiah Fleischer – Paper Nature

Paper Nature

For this project I attempted to capture the feeling of NASA’s aerial photography through an interactive paper globe. I achieved this lighting up the world’s largest cites with LEDs beneath the surface of the paper globe. The user simply selects the local WPI time on the controller and the globe automatically updates the appropriate lights.

Due to the hardware limitations of the Arduino I was using and my desire to have “flickering” lights, I was only able to install 5 LEDs in contrast to my original goal of 11 LEDs. Further, the size and shape of the globe prevented me from placing lights in the northern-most reaches of the world, including the USA, most of Europe, and parts of Russia. Unfortunately, this meant here were quite a few cities that couldn’t be displayed.

The Max Patch was actually quite simple once it was complete. I had a fair amount of issues getting serial output to work and figuring out how to encode the lighting data to send to the Arduino. I was able to work through the serial issues on my own, and JPR alerted me to the matrix controller, which was a very nice way of encoding the lighting data.

While I wasn’t able to add as many lights as I would have wanted, I’m fairly pleased with the overall result. As with most projects in AR3200, this is my first time doing anything like this, so the pride of completing the project and learning something new take precedent over trying to completely satisfy every goal I had when starting the project.

Below is the control panel, some stills of the globe, and a video of the whole system in action. Additionally, the max patch can be seen at the very bottom of the page.

10 Comments Add yours

  1. Adam Moran says:

    I really like the look of the control panel and how precise each mark seems to be.

  2. Han Liu says:

    The idea of a paper globe with LED lights in inside is smart, and the clocks of different time zones looks interesting.
    Using LEDs with different color or attaching a colored map on the surface might further improve the quality of the globe.

  3. Noah Hillman says:

    Using paper as a glove to dynamically interact is a great idea, I would recommend using a globe cut-out pattern with circular cutouts inside to mimic a true sphere.

  4. Nick Sorensen says:

    The glow of the leds gives a calming vibe to the globe. The time selection is a cool mechanism to interact with the globe, you put in a lot of work planning out the time zones and the lighting correctly.

  5. Kyria Nelson says:

    The amount of programming that went into this is intense, and I can’t even imagine the difficulty of wiring LEDs onto the inside of a sphere. All I would do is add some background music and maybe a simple repeating background animation to your Max patch – just something simple to put on the screen while one interacts with your project.

  6. Kai Liu says:

    The program is… something I can never understand, but I can tell the amount of time and effort you put into this project. And the balloon is so well-made that it could be a potential product. (It would be fantastic if you can control it remotely!)

  7. Thai Dao says:

    The visual really gives me a “vintage” feel. I’d change one minor thing: Moving the on/off switch on the control box closer to other buttons so people don’t have to extend their hand to an awkward position.

  8. Minh-Chau Doan says:

    I love the aesthetics of your piece and how it all came together its very classy and I think it showing the lights of different towns was a very innovative take on paper nature.

  9. Catherine Roberts says:

    This turned out awesome! I really like how the globe turned out and the controls are very clever with the paper fasteners looking like clocks.

  10. Aidan Sensiba says:

    I like the idea of clocks controlling what parts of the world light up, as well as the visual style of the globe itself.

Leave a Reply