By Karkhana and Art Tree Nepal
Yantra is an Art Tech Science Festival held in Nepal. The creators wanted to create a piece of art that combined their cultural heritage with technology as way to connect generations. They decided to build a modern-day prayer wheel.
The mane acts as a user-interface that controls animation. Each of the copper reliefs has a corresponding animated story that plays when you turn the mane. If you turn it fast, the animation moves fast. When you slow it down, the animation slows. And when you spin the mane backwards, you see the story in reverse.
The team used an accelerometer/gyro sensor, an Arduino, two XBee radios and bit of code in Processing. In the picture below, you can see the tech found inside the mane.
The Artree team illustrated the characters and the different settings for each story. Mekh Limbu, the lead animator, then took photos of the different settings and moved the characters to perform various actions accordingly. All of the animation work was done with Adobe Flash.