Behavior experiment

An important part of politeness is the acknowledgement of someone’s presence. When a guest enters a good restaurant, a waiter will immediately be present to greet the guest, and walk him to his table. My wood and cardboard experiments have shown me that to create a polite or friendly experience, I will need to make them alive, make them respond to the user. I took the flower cube from the cardboard experiments and fitted it with a proximity sensor, to make it see an approaching person. In the video below you can see how it reacts to someone who wants to grab the cube inside.

You can see that even this simple set-up show emerging behavior. To the human eye the little cube starts to adopt almost human traits, it does not simply open and close according to distance but it looks like it can bite back any second. My next experiments will be about bringing more models to life, check back soon!