Through a Glass Bowl
LIGHT PAINTING USING A UR5 ROBOTIC ARM
Focus Blur on a moving object is a photography technique that is impossible to replicate manually. This project is an experiment of the possibilities of focus blur in a completely controlled and repeatable setting by using a Universal Robots UR5 robotic arm, a single LED, and a program that I wrote to control the robotic arm, the precise focus of the camera, and the color of the LED.
Through a Glass Bowl
Around a Reflective Object
Reflected in a Mirror
Through a Water Bottle
PROCESS DOCUMENTATION
My inspiration for using a robot to do paintings with light came from Chris Noel who created this KUKA light painting robot for Ars Electronica.
Since painting and animations has already been done, my partner Quan and I decided to still use the robot to light paint, but light paint using computational focus blur. Quan is the designer, and I am the programmer, so we had very distinct roles in this project. This truly was an experiment since neither of us knew what to expect. All we had seen was these pictures of fireworks being focus blurred by hand:
The Black Magic Micro Cinema Came is a very hackable camera that allowed me to computationally control the focus blur with a PWM signal.
Then I created an app using ofxTimeline to control the focus of the BMMCC and the colors of an LED that was attached to the end of the robot arm. The robot arm would then move in predetermined shapes as we computationally controlled the focus. Focus blur is usually done manually and on events that cannot be controlled, like fireworks. This was an entirely controlled situation that we could play with every aspect of, because we controlled every variable. Quan then used Echo in Aftereffects to average the frames and create these “long exposure” images.
The first tests we did were with random focusing, and they looked interesting, but they also looked computer generated. In the second shoot, we aimed to integrate the streaks with real objects.
