Just finished with a busy week at Elastic{ON} 17 where we had a great demo of our latest painting robot. One of the best things to come of these exhibitions is the interaction with the audience. We can get better sense of what works as part of the exhibit as well as what doesn't.
Our whole exhibition had two parts. The first was a live interactive demo where one of our robots was tracking a live elastic index of conference attendee's wireless connections and painting them in real time. The second was an exhibition of the cloudpainter project where Hunter and I are trying to teach robots to be creative.
A wall was set up at the conference where we hung 30 canvases. Each 20-30 minutes, a 7Bot robotic arm painted dots on a black canvas. The location of the dots were taken from the geolocation of 37 wireless access points within the building.
There are lots of ways to measure the success of an exhibit like this. The main reason we think that it got across to people, though, was the shear amount of pictures and posts to social media that was occurring. There was a constant stream of interested attendees and questions.
Also, the exhibition's sponsors and conference organizers appeared to be pleased with the final results as well as all the attention the project was getting. At the end of two days, approximately 6,000 dots had been painted on the 30 canvases..
Personal highlight for me was fact that Hunter was able to join me in San Francisco. We had lots of fun at conference and were super excited to be brought on stage during the conference's closing Q&A with the Elastic Founders.
Will leave you with a pic of Hunter signing canvases for some of our elastic colleagues.
