Last week, Joanna Wrzaszczyk and I completed the first version of our dynamic light sculpture, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the Traveling Salesman Problem. We have decided to call it the Traveler’s Lamp.

Here is the midterm presentation that Joanna and I delivered in March:

We received a lot of feedback after that presentation, which resulted in a number of revisions to the lamp’s overall design. Here are some sketches I made during that process:

Since that presentation, Joanna and I successfully designed and printed ten city-nodes for the lamp. Here is the deck from our final presentation, which contains renderings of all the city-nodes:

We built the structure from laser-cut acrylic, fishing line, and 38-gauge wire. The top and base plates of the acrylic scaffolding are laser etched with the first and last page, respectively, from Invisible Cities. We fabricated the wood base on ITP’s CNC router from 3/4″ plywood.

Here are some photos of the assembled lamp:

Here’s a sketch, by Joanna, of the x-y-z coordinate plot that we fed into the computer program:

And finally, here’s some of the Python code that’s running on the Raspberry Pi:

def tsp():
    startingPin = random.choice(pins)
    pins.remove(startingPin)
    GPIO.output(startingPin, True)
    sleep(0.5)
    distances = []
    for i in range(pins):
        for p in pins:
            dist = distance(locDict[startingPin], locDict[p])
            distances.append((dist, p))
            GPIO.output(p, True)
            sleep(0.5)
            GPIO.output(p, False)
        distances = sorted(distances, key=lambda x: x[0])
        nextPin = distances[0][1]
        GPIO.output(nextPin, True)
        sleep(0.5)
        pins.remove(nextPin)
        startingPin = nextPin

This project began with a personal fascination I have with graph data. A graph is a mathematical diagram of connections between various vertices (a.k.a. nodes) and edges (a.k.a.). They can be directed (meaning the edges point in specific directions) or undirected, and generally look like this:

credit: mathinsight.org

Graphs are widely applicable data structures, relevant to a broad range of fields. The traveling salesman problem (TSP), in its classical form, involves a set of cities along with data comprising the distance from each city to every other city. Given a salesman who starts in any given city, what is the optimal path for the salesman to take in order to visit every city once and return to the city from which s/he began?

The lamp Joanna and I are designing will be a three-dimensional set of vertices, each a 3D printed city designed according to the specifications of one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The cities/vertices will be connected with light pipe, connected to LEDs, that will visualize a computer algorithm (likely running on an Arduino or Raspberry Pi) solving the traveling salesman problem in real time between the cities.

We plan to print our cities on the Connex500 printer at NYU AMS as intricate white or black structures embedded inside clear plastic. The Connex500 can make prints like this:

credit: 3ders.org

We plan to make our cities inside spheres. I designed the first one based on the first city in the book, described here:

Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward

the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver

domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved

with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows

each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already

be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them

also in other cities. But the special quality of this

city for the man who arrives there on a September

evening, when the days are growing shorter and the

multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the

doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s

voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those

who now believe they have once before lived an evening

identical to this and who think they were

happy, that time.

I focused on the description of “sixty silver domes” and made this in Rhino:

The model of a 4cm-diameter sphere contains two holes: one on the top for an LED or light pipe connection, and one going all the way through to hang the city inside a clear outer enclosure.

Before creating the city above, I created another object in Rhino, representative of what I hope we can achieve with the lamp as a whole:

Click Here for Part II

It all began with an observation I made while riding the subway in the SF Bay Area. I saw a young woman using a stenographer’s keyboard on the subway, typing very quickly. I did not want to eavesdrop, so I could not determine what she was doing on the keyboard, but she was clearly producing a lot of output. Since then, I’ve been interested in the question of whether certain individuals who perform large amounts of typing on QWERTY keyboards could benefit from the use of stenographer’s (chorded) keyboards.

More recently, I had a long discussion with my classmate, Tigran Paravyan, about graphical user interfaces, and particularly the possibility of a three-dimensional interface. The interface, as we discussed it, would be for browsing the internet, but could work for browsing files on a personal computer as well. It would exist as a forest of trees, with each tree representing a browsing session that could be returned to at a later time.

Beneath each tree, on the ground, the current browsing session would be projected. The branches of the tree could contain ornaments with files or pages linked to from the current page, with progressively more remote files or pages on higher branches of the trees. The user’s browsing history would be displayed in similar structures in the roots of the trees. A user would be able to walk, climb, dig, or fly through the environment as necessary to view the desired files or pages.

The input device we discussed would be a glove with force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) in the finger tips. A user could touch her thumb to her index finger (or press her index finger on her leg, or on a table) to perform one of the four actions (walk, climb, dig, or fly), and her three other fingers (thumbs excluded) would be mapped to the three other actions. Speed of movement would be determined be the pressure a user applies to each pad. Turning could be accomplished by pressing the left hand’s pad(s) or right hand’s pad(s) independently, pressing both at the same time to move forward. Tilt sensors or accelerometers in the gloves could be mapped to other actions, such as zooming in on a particular file or page.

Alternatively, “walking” with one’s hands could translate to walking (like in the speculative video game in the movie Her—except with more tapping—see clip below), and one of the finger pads could be mapped to an auxiliary action.

NSFW LANGUAGE WARNING

Below are various notes and sketches I made in my notepad to outline this project. I plan to discuss it with Tom Igoe on Thursday and with Daniel Shiffman shortly thereafter.

Edit: Adding (low torque) servos and stiff metal plates would result in gloves that could “feel” virtual objects. Also, I purchased this pair of motorcycle gloves to begin working with.

Here are some drawings from my notebook: