Bonding Clouds: A ReconCeiling Hotel Room
Two Spaces in One Room, Two Individuals in One Marriage
In J G Ballard's short story, "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista" (1962), Howard and Fay made multiple house tours in Vermilion Sands in search of a future home, hoping to heal the rifts in their marriage.
During that week, they argued all the time in the hotel, disagreeing on every house they viewed. They tried to stay as far from each other as possible – the room sensed the increasing distance between them, thus the lighting changed accordingly. Furthermore, whenever one of them waved their arms, their side of the ceiling shifted up or down, which created undisturbed personal spaces for them in those bitter fights.
In the video below, let’s see how we make Howard and Fay’s story come true with Bonding Clouds; you can also check out this additional paragraph we wrote for "The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista".
Two Spaces in One Room
Bonding Clouds aims to create the feeling of two spaces without actually building a separating wall in the room – just like two individuals in one marriage. The organic, cloud-like ceiling splits Howard and Fay during fights, with the changing lighting connecting two spaces from the top. When they are ready to talk again, the ceiling raises, and the whole room is back to one to reconnect the couple.
How Does It Work?
The ceiling is made from tulle and fabric and controlled by two servos on wooden sticks. It reacts to gestures detected by the gesture sensor, while the two ultrasonic distance sensors on the two opposite corners determine the distance between Howard and Fay. The signal is then transmitted to the LED above the ceiling, which lights up with different colors according to the different distances.
3 Designs, 3 Moods
When both Howard and Fay are in the middle of the room, it stays as one open space and lights up in green to reflect the calm and peaceful atmosphere (state 1). When one of them walks away from one another to their own corner, the room turns yellow, and then orange if the distance between the couple gets longer. One side of the ceiling collapses down if one of them makes the downward movement with their arm (state 2). If both Howard and Fay retreat to their own corners and put their arms down, the lights go red with both sides of the ceiling falling down, the room gets separated into two spaces, reflecting the tension between the couple (states 3).
Prototype Demo: Lighting
Prototype Demo: Movement
How Did We Get Here?
With the “two spaces in one place” idea in mind, we kept iterating. We developed 4 ideas and 3 prototypes in total, from moving floors, walls, curtains, and finally, the ceiling.
Duration
2022/10 - 2022/12
Instructor
Dr. Keith Evan Green
Team Members
Hsin-Ming Chao, Karlijn van den Bos, Jhovanna Perez
Our team developed this idea in the course Architectural Robotics, which was under Cornell University Human Centered Design. This model is based on this Marriott floor plan and powered by Arduino Grove Board with the “Ultrasonic.h”, “Servo.h”, “Wire.h”, <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>, <avr/power.h>, <paj7620.h> libraries installed.
