im working on a exhibition taking place inside a greenhouse of a botanic garden during summer.
The venue and season will be challenging in terms of creating interactive installations within the greenhouse itself.
I was wondering if any of you have some experiences working under similar conditions and could give some input on what hardware and/or interactive concepts i should completely avoid.
During summer the inside of the greenhouse will be at times:
Very Hot
Issues: Heating problems with pc’s etc
Wet / Moist / High - Very high air humidity
Issues: Problems with capacitive Sensors / Touchscreen / Camera lenses get foggy? - PC’s
Touchscreens if working - surfaces might not be desirable to touch? Touchscreen get greasy after touch?
Too hot for projectors in general? Problems with other type of sensors - electric components in general?
Very bright inside - sunlight
Issues: Regular screens / Touchscreens not Bright enough - may need Lightshielding? Other Screen options that work better in brightness?
Projectors will not be bright enough?
The concept will be created as several exhibition-stages that should work as a traveling exhibition, so tipps on weather proof housing for screens / pcs would also help.
It would also be helpful if anyone has ever worked with plants + sensors / cameras / 3d scans / interfacing with plants in general. Links to projects would be very interesting!
Vegetation from a typical czech forest was growing inside of humid and cold room(and sometimes hot).
Foggy lenses were no problem since the camera gets quite hot (Flea3 and Kinect). Same for the LCD screens. The water does not condense on a surfaces that are hotter than the surrounding air.
High temperatures (+40°C) were a problem since the fans got clogged by construction dust that was still there during the setup. Also the vegetation and soil created lot of dirt that was creating adding friction to the mechanical components. PCs were in a separate room so they were not exposed to humidity.
Thanks for the reply! Very cool project! Will have to use google translate to fully understand everything thats happening but very informative and inspiring! Like the concept of an exhibition as scientific Experiment!
Suprised that kinect works well, great news.
Hardware Tipps and unexpected issues like dirt are very useful. Seperate room makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, would be cool to have the site with better descriptions and translation to English.
Kinect360 surprised me as well, it was rock solid.
I believe there is one more important aspect to making installation like this running successfully - Make the infortrainers/custodians engaged and let them understand that things sometimes don’t work as they should. Infotrainers should notice the technical staff(you) when things go wrong and it’s best if they have ability to fix minor issues.
The installation should also monitor it’s state. CPU/GPU temperature, number of interactions, measure the noise from the sensor to find out when they are disconnected, etc.
You may consider running the installation from embedded platforms like Raspberry Pi with read-only filesystem.
