Initial Movements

The previous experiments, by mapping the tortoise's movements across the entirety of the apartment, give a view into the long terms effects of stimuli upon the tortoise. In monitoring her movements, though, one sometimes gets the feeling that perhaps there is no master plan or memory involved, and she is just being drawn from one stimulus to the next. In reality there is probably a combination of being immediately compelled by certain stimuli and seeking out a broader goal, but I felt it would be interesting in the project to study her very first movements upon being released.

In general, I tend to set the tortoise down to begin her journey on a big blue rug in the middle of the living room. Fortunately, this carpet has a pattern of stars on it which form a grid. This is perfect for an analysis of her movements! The idea is to see what motivates the tortoise in the short run by placing representatives of the experimental stimuli equidistantly around her. With five stimuli total i created a pentagon on the carpet, the center of which would be her starting point.

Now before we could being testing her against the additional stimuli, we first had to calibrate the experiment for whatever stimuli were already present. For this reason the full experiment has a control group of paths for which the only stimuli present were the background heats, sounds, smells, lights, and electro-magnetism already recorded.

Each condition, with and without additional stimuli, featured 10 trials, and her intial orientation was shifted in each trial to ward off any biases dependent on which way she was pointing. The tortoise was set in the center and allowed to wander freely until she had stopped for 5 minutes, 10 minutes had elapsed, or she had traveled out of the testing area (the carpet).



In the same fashion as the paths experiment, where her progress was tracker through each room of the house by an array of cameras, the tortoise's motion paths were captured using the motion tracking tools in Adobe After Effects.

The resulting motion paths were then attached to a particle generator in After Effects, creating animated paths that follow the tortoise's trail.


As in the experiment with the top-down view of the apartment, gradient meshes were once again constructed in Adobe Illustrator to visually represent the stimuli that Vanya may be experiencing. These specific meshes were created using the previously recorded data (for the condition without stimuli), and data specific to the pentagon of stimuli.




Using the overlay of the different stimuli, one can begin to analyze possible attractors and repulsors concerning her initial movement.


Note: I used a guitar as the representative for sound upon discovering that the frequency range of a guitar is quite similar to the frequency range able to be picked up by the tortoise's internal ears. Since the guitar is outputting multiple, superimposed frequencies the visualization displays the average frequency output (around 175 Hz) for the guitar.