Super Bloom

The superpower that I want to obtain is to make flower bloomwhen I walk by it. Mainly three scientific methods come to my mind to make this process realistic.

1. Programmed- artificial flower

There are innumerable existing art installation trying to mimi+c this process by developing articifitial flower blossom. The MEADOW developed by Studio Drift is basically producing a ceiling decoration, with a sensor attached to trace the movement of people nearby. They are probaoblity using software such as grasshopper for Rhinoceros and arduino to engineer these structures. There are also some parametric folding technique involved.

However, the effect of this installation is too artificial, that it cannot give people the sense of surprise as to use real flowers. So I came up with a scheme that is a little bit crule and too straight forward.Firstly we will have to make flexible plant specimen based on real plant and the plant should not be pressed and dehydrated to allow for the flexibility for it to be bend later. Then implant structures in it. The structure should be built with geometric bound generated from origami principles, so that it can be engineered. Eventually the most easy part will be to attach a sensor to it, so when someone approach the artifitial flower, it we become upstraight, as if it is blooming.

Here is a brief sketch of the prototyping idea:

2.Bio-responsive plant

There are also other installations that use actual plant to achieve the same effect. In here, the bio-sensitivity of plant is employed. In the Bio-responsive garden project. Plant species such as mimosa is utilized. Those plants are naturally reponsive to human touch. So, with adequate supporting structure, these plant can autmatically show a path way when people come.

Builing on top of these project, I am thinking to add to the employment of the responsive nature of plants and automate the process of human touch. Then the plants will either move of give off scents.

3. Interactive plant

The second scheme will be of more ingenuity, where cyborg plants are developed. I draw inspiration from the exisitng on Touché sensing technology invented and developed earlier at Disney Research, Pittsburgh. At Disney Research, Ivan Poupyrev in collaboration with Philipp Schoessler, Jonas Loh, and Munehiko Sato a project called The Botanicus Interacticus is being developed.

With this technology we will not really have to make the plant boom, we can use the plant as indicator for many atmospheric parameters.