Mirabilia Floris
Interactive electronic installation
With Auréline Goubert, Axel Gervais, and Gabriel Carpentier
Context
Mirabilia Floris invites the visitor to meet a flower with an eye in place of its pistil. As soon as a presence enters its space, the flower wakes up and follows them with its gaze, until a nearby chime comes to unsettle it. Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, the installation questions our relationship to power when faced with something that seems strange or vulnerable to us. The flower never changes; it's the way we look at it that changes everything.
Role
I was responsible for the AI vision, the servo motor response, and the integration of the whole system.
Challenge
The real challenge of Mirabilia Floris was running AI vision fully autonomously on a simple ESP32-S3 with a small OV2640 camera, with no computer connected at all: every computation happens directly on the microcontroller. To keep things smooth despite those limited resources, I built a hybrid architecture: a deep-learning face-detection model locates the face at regular intervals, while a lighter tracking algorithm, based on skin-tone detection, takes over between full detections to save on computation. The coordinates are normalized, smoothed, then sent over UART to the Arduino Mega, which translates them into fluid movement for the eye's servo motors, all in real time, with no perceptible latency that would break the illusion.