The scope

Once a year, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam challenges creatives to come up with concepts based on the Rijksstudio, a digitized open-source library of artworks owned and/or currated by the museum.

Concept and inspiration

When opening the Ambient app, the users can login to their Rijksstudio account where they find all the lists they curated beforehand. Each piece has its own unique set of colors. When a list is opened and the lamp is connected, the first art piece in the list will show up and the sphere will change its color and brightness to suite the color and atmosphere of the painting. When the user swipes through the pieces in the list, the lamp will change its appearance accordingly. The user can choose the Caravaggio-mode, which changes the light source. The spotlight turns on with a suitable color and brightness. The spot is directed through the iris, which opens and closes automatically. To not distract the user from the light, the minimalist lamp is colored in white with wooden details.

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I was intrigued by, how Vermeer and Rembrandt use light to make their paintings more vivid. Many dutch painters were inspired by Caravaggio and how he played with light and shadow. The Rijksstudio Ambient Lamp can change its light setting to suite an art piece.

Process, tools and challenges

Due to the deadline, my ambition to deliver a working prototype and the fact that I was working full-time as a researcher, I narrowed down the ideation process to a bare minimum. The mechanical design was modelled using solidworks, 3D-printed on an FDM printer and manually finished and spray-painted. The iris diaphragm that opens and closes according to the image portrayed in the app was calculated using iris-calculator and manufacured on a laser cutter. It is controlled by a servomotor and an ESP32 microcontroller that is implemented into the IoT architecture. For the light source I used two different smart LED bulps (an Ikea E27 bulp in the sphere and a Philips Hue GU5.3 spot behind the iris diaphragm).

The app as well as the interaction with the physical product was prototyped using protopie via a custom android bridge app and the IoT protocol MQTT. All the wireless interactions were implemented using NodeRed and mosquito on a Raspberry Pi.