Interactive, tangible models for education and watermanagement
Wetropolis will be present at Maker Festival Twente, May 25th and 26th, at Rozendaal Ateliers (Stroinksbleekweg2 and 4) which is next to the cafe terrace in front of the Museum Fabriek. 100Fat presents the sandbox and you are welcome to visit Wowlab next door, in the same building. Wowlab also demonstrates the CNC mill and the lasercutter
Sarndbox is software that works with a kinect (3D camera) and projects running water over a sandbox where channels are dug. Real time this water follows dug out channels. We were amazed and wanted to use it for “dry “landscapes and dig rivers, channels, and make it interactive. See also the post on 20 nov 2018 about the sandbox.
We, that is: consortium member 100Fat, tested this sandbox with Lego models, which worked more or less as expected. Unexpected and perhaps more interesting results came from working with just plain pieces of wood, hand sized. Very easy to work with, like children playing with wooden blocks . The elevation was recorded well by the Kinect. It was (for now) monitored on a screen (later it will be beamed on the blocks itself). Water was “added”: holding the hand under the Kinect triggers the program to make a source there. It actually did follow the blocks, like water cascading down. Amazing to see. It can probably be improved, speeded up, work for the coming time for 100Fat in Enschede who works on this part.
Wetropolis stond op Expeditie Next in Rotterdam met de lego workshop: bouw je eigen rivier en test deze uit. Nieuw was een Lego Galton board. De kinderen vonden het fascinerend. In volgende versies wordt dit verder uitgewerkt.
Wout Zweers visited the Rhino Developers day in Amsterdam Nov 2018. A very intersting new development is the possibility to run an interactive model in a browser (like Chrome). It is a alpha tryout, it may enable showing the waterlevels and the sliders to change the amount of rain, or generate rain randomly and see what happens.
This would make it possible that many people can play with the amount of rain and see what happens with the river.
The waves of Wetropolis flow through the river. Aug 2016.
