Speaking paper parrot

Today I wanted to share a little prototype I was working on for a charity event. It’s not yet finished, but well on its way. This is a money collecting box with a parrot sitting on top of it. Whenever someone drops money in the box, the parrot says something.

Here is a video:

How it works: In the box is a regular Android phone, running a custom app I wrote. The app is essentially a motion detector, registering when the camera image changes and playing one of a number of prerecorded sounds.

The parrot is a low polygon (facetted) paper model. I am currently working on coloring it, and it will be released here as soon as it’s done. The parrot works quite nicely as a standalone model, without the box and app, by the way. It’s a bit tricky to build, especially around the beak, where the polygons are a bit crowded, but it came out quite nice at the first build.

As for the Android app (which also works well independent of the parrot), there is still some way to go before it can be released. At the moment, it’s a very early prototype, which needs quite some more tweaking and testing.