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" Morgan Rauscher might just be the quintessential 21st-century Renaissance man. He is at once an artist and an entrepreneur, as comfortable in a machine shop as he is in a computer lab. Fluent in no fewer than a dozen programming languages, he dabbles in such fields as cybernetics and robotics but is also an ace with a belt sander. And at last weekend&amp;#039;s World Maker Faire, he was manning a booth and hawking computer hardware of his own design, while the passing crowds oohed and aahed at his latest creation: Zeugen V2. Actually, the typical response to Zeugen V2 wasn&amp;#039;t really &amp;quot;ooh&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;aah.&amp;quot; The utterances overheard were more along the lines of &amp;quot;Whoa, that is scary&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Totally creepy, but pretty awesome.&amp;quot; These weren&amp;#039;t unfounded sentiments. Consisting of 32 motion-tracking robotic faces and enclosed behind a 7 x 4-foot two-way mirror, Zeugen is a positively disturbing creation. But like its creator, Zeugen\u2014which means &amp;quot;witness&amp;quot; in German\u2014is multifaceted. It is both an art piece and a technology demonstration.  Zeugen is experienced in two parts: The front side, with the 32 sets of eyes, is called, naturally, the &amp;quot;Face Side,&amp;quot; while the back side, home to the guts of the operation, is called the &amp;quot;Tech Side.&amp;quot; When a viewer steps before the Face Side, a garden-variety webcam wired to a laptop with motion-tracking software picks up the movement and activates the faces. As the viewer moves in front of the installation, the eerily backlit robotic eyes follow. Meanwhile, on the Tech Side, a veritable orchestra of 96 tiny servomotors and 384 LEDs clicks, twists and flashes in response to the Face Side conduction.   It&amp;#039;s all made possible by hardware designed by Rauscher himself. Expanding on the entry-level electronics-prototyping technology known as Arduino, Rauscher developed a modular hardware platform called MondoMatrix. The centerpiece of the system is Displayduino, a microcontroller capable of handling 32 inputs/outputs compared with Arduino&amp;#039;s 16 to 20. Rauscher also conceived three expansion boards, which regulate servomotors, LEDs and electrical devices. With Zeugen, information from the motion-tracking software passes from the laptop to Displayduino, which sends the commands to move and fade and illuminate to the motors and lights located on the Tech Side.  Rauscher says that while MondoMatrix is a fairly new concept\u2014he only began selling Displayduino and the expansion boards this spring, following two years of research\u2014the reception has been warm. Several multimedia artists have used the technology in their own interactive installations. MondoMatrix also has distribution deals with a number of North American and European retailers, including Boulder, Colorado-based SparkFun Electronics, an online vendor committed to making the latest in microcontroller and expansion-board technology accessible to the average tinkerer. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a6147/this-project-is-watching-you/>