Wade pulled together a small team to build a prototype semi-autonomous robot in a Victorian dress. Our job was to provide an interface between the web and the controller board. We installed a small webserver on an EeePC netbook. An Adobe Flash socket sent mouse clicks and speech instructions to a tiny Python server that interpreted whether the instructions should be forwarded to the controller board or handled by the EeePC. Speech commands were forwarded to the onboard Festival server using an MBROLA english male voice and then piped to the sound card.

We used small form MicroClient SNR computers running Debian and some funky Python scripts. The system was quite polite – should you refuse any message it would leave you alone henceforth.

The Stride was the artwork we tested with. An installation depicting the final 100m of Cathy Freeman’s gold medal 400m sprint. We sent the public a text description, then a video of the race, finally an image of the site. Response was much better than expected given the public’s general suspicion of Bluetooth in general.