Testing at the Imperial Festival

4th Year EIE student Helen with her smart punching bag

Thousands of visitors flocked to South Kensington at the weekend as part of the Imperial Festival.

The Imperial Festival showcased the very best in science, technology and arts at the College.

Festival goers got stuck in to our exhibits from manipulating a crane with and without computer control (run by Dr Eric Kerrigan, Bulat Khusinov & Omar Faqir from Control and Power), to testing out their strength on a smart punching bag. The bag is a final year Electronic and Information (EIE) project designed by Helen Root to help train boxers for fights.

Professor Bob Spence and Dr Mark Witkowski’s team in the Vision and Sixth Sense exhibit explored a variety of optical illusions and games and tested perception skills by taking visitors on a virtual urban search mission.   Julia Booth, another EIE student, demonstrated her final year project for pedestrians or cyclists to discover a new ‘sixth sense’ by wearing a device which warns the user to turn a particular direction or to be beware of junctions.

Ecobuilder - a popular 2016 Festival collaboration between Dr Dan Goodman and Jonathan Zheng (Intelligent Systems and Networks) and Dr Samrat Pawar (Department of Life Sciences) returned for its second year. This game allows festival goers to see what happens when new species are introduced to an ecosystem or go extinct.

See our highlights in the storify below!