Tobias Toft » thesis http://tobiastoft.dk About interaction design, geeky things and maybe even Helvetica. Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:31:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Deadline getting closer… http://tobiastoft.dk/deadline-getting-closer http://tobiastoft.dk/deadline-getting-closer#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:47:47 +0000 Tobias http://tobiastoft.dk/?p=445 Only five more days to go before the final exams start. Here’s a little taste of what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months. More info will be available very soon!

Three_products_4-3-with_text_small

]]> http://tobiastoft.dk/deadline-getting-closer/feed 2 First version of the Braitenberg vehicles http://tobiastoft.dk/first-version-of-the-braitenberg-vehicles http://tobiastoft.dk/first-version-of-the-braitenberg-vehicles#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:06:00 +0000 Tobias http://tobiastoft.dk/?p=408 My thesis at CIID is about objects with personality and the different ways there are to implement “artificial” personality in otherwise stupid objects. As part of my research I have decided to take a closer look at Valentino Braitenberg’s work with synthetic psychology in the beginning of the 80’s. Especially his investigations in the book “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology” where he designed the rather famous Braitenberg vehicles.

The vehicles are extremely simple electronic objects, that seem to show a specific personality from their actions. The interesting thing is, that they are in fact extremely stupid, but because we (humans) only look at their actions without knowing why they act as they do, we tend to project our own logic and reason to them and thereby give them a personality that they actually don’t have. It sounds a bit complicated, but actually it isn’t – it’s just because I can’t explain it properly yet :)

I decided to base them on Arduino, though it might be overkill – the reason I did it is to keep flexibility, so that I later can upload more advanced firmware to the bots. Here’s a photo I took of one of my boards – unfortunately I put it upside down!

Anyway, of course I also snapped some photos of the first vehicle and it’s half-finished sibling today. Here they are:

Braitenberg vehicle - side view

You can see more photos in my Flickr photoset.

]]> http://tobiastoft.dk/first-version-of-the-braitenberg-vehicles/feed 0