Surrealist Dreams Portal

[squirmelia]

A few months ago, I submitted a proposal for an art installation / portal at the Ingress Schloss Kaltenberg event for the Dreamer archetype, and on Saturday night, the portal, "Surrealist Dreams" came to life!

If a player captured the portal while playing Ingress on their phone, a neon lobster would dance, bubbles would be blown, a cuckoo noise could be heard and strips of LEDs would turn green or blue depending which team captured the portal.

This all worked by having Raspberry Pis and Arduinos that would get data about the portal from the Techthulhu device that Niantic provided.

A giant power cube sat next to the portal, and next to that a dancing glyph game ("dance dance glyphalution") where you had to dance out the glyphs that you saw on the screen.

When the game wasn't being played, surrealist videos were shown.

People could draw or write messages on the structure with UV chalk that glows in the black light.

I also handed out rainbow glasses.

I stood on the giant power cube and addressed the audience while wearing a Dali Lobster Telephone costume, trying to explain about the portal.

I had an excellent team who helped bring my idea to life and added their own ideas and were generally brilliant at making this project happen successfully! Thank you so much for your support and help and all the expertise you all brought to this project!



The power cube, dance mat and the portal:


The Dreamer sign for our portal:


Me playing the dancing glyph game:


The lobster:


The Surrealist Dreams portal as it appeared in Ingress:

Comments

[squirmelia]

More technical details about the bubble machine / cuckooing sound:

I initially had decided to connect a bubble machine to an Arduino with a relay shield, and this worked well and I was able to get the bubble machine to blow bubbles when I wanted by writing code to do so. I used an ESP8266 module with the Arduino to connect to wifi. I had also decided I would use a Raspberry Pi to connect via wifi to the Techthulhu to read the data about the portal and then play a cuckoo sound when the portal was captured. In the end, I just combined the two and used a Raspberry Pi and relays for the bubble machines and for the cuckooing sound and this worked a lot better. I was able to run the Raspberry Pi headless and write a short amount of Python to connect to the Techthulhu, read the data, and then trigger the relays and the sound. I hadn't really used a Raspberry Pi before, but would again in the future.

[green_knight]

This is an incredibly cool project and I am glad it worked on the day!

[clare42]

That is super!

[miss_newham]

Congratulations! I'm glad it worked out!

[squirmelia]

Thank you!