The process of
animation begins,
after the pieces
are cut out digitally
using photo
editing softwarePi, the touchscreen still worked in landscape
mode; the mapping between where you touched
the screen and where you clicked was wrong.”
After a lot of trial and error, they decided to keep
Raspberry Pi running in landscape and just rotated
all the animations.
Digital deputy
They have also worked hard to ensure that DARVA
has a lifelike quality, and introduced a degree of
randomness to the robot’s actions. “The gauge
rotates to a random position, for example, and
the eyes randomly look left or right for a random
amount of time,” says Nicole. DARVA also loops
through a series of texts that Dane and Nicole
have written to give some more information about
their booth at events, while some animations
are activated by clicking or touching parts of the
screen, including DARVA’s head and belly.
So, how have people reacted to their new digital
sidekick? Dane tells us there was some initial
confusion at one event: “We placed the original felt
version of DARVA next to the touchscreen, because
we thought it would be interesting to show how we
went from a felt robot to a digital one. However,
a lot of people thought the felt robot and the
touchscreen were somehow connected and could
interact, which was confusing because moving or
touching the felt didn’t do anything.” However,
DARVA has received a lot of compliments: “Kids
especially loved the look and feel of it.”
Dane and Nicole are considering developing
the project further. “Maybe we can make it a
video game, or an interactive story, or connect
the felt robot to the digital robot as many people
expected,” says Nicole. “We have so many ideas,
we hardly know what we eventually will end up
making, but one thing is for sure: it will involve a
Raspberry Pi!”> The project took
about 20 hours
to complete> Sewing the felt
parts was the most
time-consuming
element> Felt is a quick
and cheap way to
create in a range of
shapes/colours> The animations are
run in Chromium> DARVA is an
acronym of
‘Digitized Analog
Robot Virtual
Assistant’Quick FA C T S
They have worked hard to
ensure that DARVA has a
lifelike quality
The robot’s sewn felt pieces
were photographed and then
used to create animationsDARVA: The Event Assistant magpi.cc 13PROJECT SHOWCASE