What have you made?
The Selfie Plant is a Plant that takes pictures of itself and posts on it’s Facebook profile.
What gave you the initial inspiration?
In recent times, the selfie culture has risen in popularity, but it has also raised a few questions. Whether the Selfie culture helps to build self-esteem or does it force us for self-obsession? Is it an expression for admiration or is it to achieve a sense of self, place and community?
What if nature gets addicted to the selfie culture and expresses itself. If it could record moments like blooming of a flower or a new leaf, and then share these moments on the social network. What if this expression could draw people’s attention and invite participation. How would people react if a normal plant starts to interact with their social lives.
Possibly in a future scenario, the plant can become autonomous and not be owned by an individual, but shared within a community. Everyone would take care of the plant in turns. With its unique social behaviour the plant might be able to draw public attention and would act as a bridge between humans and nature.
How does it work?
The plant is powered by Arduino Yun, which controls the servo motors and adjust the positions of the plant and the camera stick. A python script communicates with Facebook’s graph API to post the captured photos on plant’s Facebook profile.
The code has been posted at github.
How long did it take to make it real?
Being a classroom project; it was conceptualised and built in a very short time of 4 days.