Project 1
Romeo and Juliet
Robots and performing arts share a long history. In fact, the word "Robot" was first coined in 1920 for a play by the Czech author Karel Čapek named "Rossum's Universal Robots". The play featured six robots, but since nobody was able to build a talking Robot at that time, humans had to play them. Times have changed a lot and we don't need humans to disguise themselves as robots anymore. For this project, we will do it the other way round and make some robots who play the humans. Unfortunately, "Rossum's Universal Robots" would require nine humans and six robots, so I chose a scene that's simpler to perform. We are going to build a pair of robots who play the humans in the famous balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet.
Mission Briefing
To create the Processing sketches for this project, we will need to install the Processing library ttslib. This library is a wrapper around the FreeTTS Java library that helps us to write a sketch that reads out text. We will learn how to change the voice parameters of thekevin16 voice of the FreeTTS package to make our robot's voices distinguishable. We will also create a parser that is able to read the Shakespeare script and which generates text-line objects that allow our script to know which line is read by which robot.
Romeo and Juliet
A Drama thread will be used to control the text-to-speech objects, and thedraw() method of our sketch will print the script on the screen while our robots perform it, just in case one of them forgets a line. Finally, we will use some cardboard boxes and a pair of cheap speakers to create the robots and their stage. The following figure shows how the robots work:
Juliet - Robot |
Romeo - Robot |
Speakers |
Computer |
Why Is It Awesome?
Since the 18th century, inventors have tried to build talking machines (with varying success). Talking toys swamped the market in the 1980s and 90s. In every decent Sci-Fi novel, computers and robots are capable of speaking. So how could building talking robots not be awesome? And what could be more appropriate to put these speaking capabilities to test than performing a Shakespeare play? So as you see, building actor robots is officially awesome, just in case your non-geek family members should ask.
Your Hotshot Objectives
We will split this project into four tasks that will guide you through the generation of the robots from beginning to end. Here is a short overview of what we are going to do:
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Making Processing talk
Reading Shakespeare
Adding more actors
Building robots
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Project 1
Making Processing talk
Since Processing has no speaking capabilities out of the box, our first task is adding an external library using the new Processing Library Manager. We will use the ttslib package, which is a wrapper library around the FreeTTS library.
We will also create a short, speaking Processing sketch to check the installation.
Engage Thrusters
1.Processing can be extended by contributed libraries. Most of these additional libraries can be installed by navigating to Sketch | Import Library… | Add Library..., as shown in the following screenshot:
2.In the Library Manager dialog, enter ttslib in the search field to filter the list of libraries.
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Romeo and Juliet
3.Click on the ttslib entry and then on the Install button, as shown in the following screenshot, to download and install the library:
4.To use the new library, we need to import it to our sketch. We do this by clicking on the Sketch menu and choosing Import Library... and then ttslib.
5.We will now add the setup() and draw() methods to our sketch. We will leave the draw() method empty for now and instantiate a TTS object in the setup() method. Your sketch should look like the following code snippet:
import guru.ttslib.*;
TTS tts;
void setup() { tts = new TTS();
}
void draw() {
}
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