Please disable AdBlock. CAN is an ad-supported site that takes hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to sustain.

Botanicus Interacticus – Designing interactive plants at Disney Research

Botanicus Interacticus is the tatest project created at Disney Research by Ivan Poupyrev in collaboration with Philipp Schoessler, Jonas Loh/Studio NAND, and Munehiko Sato. The project is concerned with developing technology for designing “highly expressive interactive plants”, both living and artificial. Driven by the rapid fusion of computing and living spaces, the team take interaction from computing devices and places it in the physical world using livings plants as an interactive medium.

Botanicus Interacticus has a number of unique properties. This instrumentation of living plants is simple, non-invasive, and does not damage the plants: it requires only a single wire placed anywhere in the plant soil. Botanicus Interacticus allows for rich and expressive interaction with plants. It allows to use such gestures as sliding fingers on the stem of the orchid, detecting touch and grasp location, tracking proximity between human and a plant, and estimating the amount of touch contact, among others.

The team uses “Pepper’s Ghost” technique to augment a living plant and dynamically change in response to the user interaction with a plant. Christian Riekoff and TheGreenEyl joined Disney Research on designing and producing the SIGGRAPH 2012 Botanicus Interacticus exhibition.

Project Page | PDF

Ivan Poupyrev | Philipp Schoessler | Jonas Loh/Studio NAND| Munehiko Sato | Christian Riekoff | TheGreenEyl

See also SIGGRAPH 2012 Botanicus Interacticus exhibition.

/via Wired UK

Related Posts

  • http://twitter.com/maxenceparache Maxence Parache

    The pepper’s ghost effect is stunning, I would love to see this extended to an entire tree (or forest! welcome to Pandora)