Wisdom Well

The Motive

Wisdom Well is a project as proposed by Mithilesh Sarode a New Media Designer as an interactive installation for a biographical museum on the life of Swami Vivekananda.

The motive behind this installation is to make the visitors of the museum aware of the various articles and stories published by the Ramakrishna Mission in their publications. The installation attempts to create an immersive experience of drawing wisdom out of a well that holds the infinite knowledge pertaining to the life of the Swami, his Guru and the ideologies of Vedanta.

The Idea

The Wisdom Well is an amalgamation of 2 different ideas. The idea of Wisdom is derived from the publications started by Swami Vivekananda. After his return from America in 1897, he started publications to spread the ideas of Vedanta. Having been in print for more than 120 years, one can imagine them to be the manifestation of the wisdom of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Vedanta.

The well is inspired from one of his stories that he had delivered at the Parliament of World’s Religions. In his speech, titled Why we disagree (15th Sept 1893), he says that we are all like a frog in a well. The walls of the well represent the society, customs, rituals and religion in which we grow up and we, like the frog, deny the existence of anything that comes from beyond these walls. Similarly, one can imagine Ramakrishna Mission also as a well, but the difference being that the walls are permeable to things coming from outside. Ramakrishna himself believed and followed rituals and customs of many other religions.

The idea here was to create an interactive installation that would allow the users to access the knowledge in the publications through a simple, intuitive and playful medium. The visitor of the museum interacts with the installation by pulling out the bucket suspended inside the well. Every time the bucket is pulled out, it brings out a new story with it and narrates it to the visitors.

My role in the project

I joined Mithilesh in May 2017, as Design Associate to develop the interactive installation further using Unity application which will incorporate all the desired interactions. My role in the project was to restructure the whole system programmatically, understand and declare system states, create desired transitions between these states upon different user interactions, animations within Unity and optimization.

Challenges within project

Besides the idea and interactions being quite simple, there are a lot of minute but important details involved. The bucket holds a neo-pixel led strip which gets lit up as the bucket is pulled out and transitions color as the story proceeds. This happens via Bluetooth communication through Arduino nano with Unity application. The application detects the user's presence before he/she even pulls the bucket using a distance sensor which is also connected to the application via Arduino nano. These hardware communication can be slightly annoying at times. Other than the hardware the application also has several color schemes and challenging animations like fish flocking. Me being a programmer first, this project seemed aesthetically quite challenging but that was one of the reasons that I took it up.