Review: Nightlife at the Academy

By Greg Zeman
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A patrol of knee-high, spherical, steel robots with colorful, blinking, gyroscopic brains glided through the crowd of people, stopping intermittently to nudge or observe a particular individual. A vision of a terrifying future? Perhaps, but it was also part of the vibrant scene at the California Academy of Science’s weekly Night Life event that happens every Thursday, where this week’s theme was robotics.

The robots are part of a project called SWARM. Michael Prados, a member of the SWARM team, explained the project, “SWARM started as an art project in 1997, and it’s made up of six spherical robots. The robots all have on-board, Linux based computers, a GPS, inertia sensors and a gyroscope. The idea is that we can run them in formation.”

“When the robots are running in autonomous mode, each one of them will compose music as it rolls. When they get closer together, they’re constrained to compose music that cooperates with each other . With the lights: there’s a color scheme and they kind of wander around it, but if they form close together, they converge to one color scheme,” said Simran Gleaso, Academy of Science sound sculptor.

“We also have these adapted video game console remote controls and we basically gutted them and replaced them with their own custom circuitry and protocol,” Prados said. Gleason and others used the remotes to animate the robots and demonstrate their mobility.

City College student Anya MacDonald was impressed. “The fact that they do this is wonderful . . . I’m really kind of blown away by robots, I think they’re great, it’s very entertaining,” MacDonald said.

Away from the robot-infested Africa wing of the academy, revelers chilled out in the cool, blue glow of the aquarium or cut loose on a makeshift dance floor in front of an exhibit on Darwin’s Galapagos finches.

Bars were scattered throughout the museum and the 21-and-over crowd made full use of them. The overall vibe was exuberant and friendly, everyone seemed excited to be there.

DJ Nako, who has been a DJ for roughly 14 years, was ecstatic about performing for the energetic crowd.

“It’s nice that you can have an event like this in a museum. Usually a museum means be quiet, be on your best behavior, and it’s great to have a middle ground where you have people who can behave well but who can have fun and dance and drink and not fall in the alligator pit,” said Nako.

“I found that the researchers have a lot of fun coming on the floor because they don’t usually have the chance to interact with an audience like that,” said  Cat Aboudara, manager of special programming for the Academy.

Aboudara hopes the program continues to open up science for more people, “This is to bring in people who normally wouldn’t come into a natural history museum — to actually make science less scary,” she said.