On November 5th, 1989, the first public exhibition of The Robot Group’s work was held at Discovery Hall, a hands-on science museum in Austin (no longer in existence).
The event was called RoboFest and it broke all previous attendance records at the museum. We are sorry that Discovery Hall did not survive as an entity. This happens to a lot of non-profit groups; however, the spirit of Discovery Hall lives on in other organizations like ours that continue to push the science education envelope.
A large and curious crowd collected, eager to see The Robot Group’s imaginative creations which included :
- Varmint, a four-legged, computerized, walking, pneumatic-driven sculpture
- An eight-legged, segmented, metallic Centipede [1]
- A Fish Blimp that swam through the air, using its tail fin for propulsion
- The Mark I Cybernetic Airship with an on-board computer controlling the speed and angle of its two propellers
- The Venus Project, an interactive environment in which the participants created music and computer graphics by dancing in a stomp-pad while wearing headgear with tilt-sensors wired to a synthesizer
[1] Brooks Coleman has suggested that the Centipede evolved into the Mechanical Pit Bull.
The background material for this page is derived from an archived page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Some links may have been added, removed, or updated.
