Every week between now and launch, we post what came off the bench. Waitlist members see it by email first.
Nobody notices a mechanism until they hear it. This week went into the parts of the build you're meant to forget, how movement settles, how it stops, how a face comes to rest without announcing that a motor just finished doing something.
This weekend, Orbicularis Systems makes its first in-person public appearance at Maker Faire Bay Area, September 25 to 27 at the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, CA. If you're at the Faire, come find us, see the work in person, and say hello. It's the first time anyone outside the studio gets to look a build in the eye.
We test a face the same way an animator does: one expression, held, then released. If a single look doesn't land on its own, blending it into a performance won't save it. So the week is spent on singles, brow, blink, the corner of a mouth.
A skin that comes out of the mold clean, in one piece, with the sculpt still readable in it, that's the milestone we've been chasing. It took more attempts than we'd like to admit, and the next one will take a few more.
A finished sculpt is only half the job. The plaster mold that comes off it decides how much of the original expression survives into silicone, so we pull test skins, look at how light falls across them, and go back to the sculpt when it doesn't read right.
Charisma is the spec. We keep asking one question of every revision: does it feel like someone is in there? Small changes around the brow and mouth change the answer completely, which is why this stage takes as long as it does.
Motorized, emotional, versatile, and small enough to sit in your hand. Every part we make has to earn its space, so most of the week goes into fitting movement into a volume that keeps shrinking.
Before a single motor goes in, the face is sculpted by hand and refined until it reads as a character rather than a mechanism. That sculpt becomes the reference every later layer has to live up to.
Our prototyping studio is where the whole thing gets made, sculpting, molding, fabrication and assembly all happen a few feet apart, so an idea and the part it turns into never have far to travel.
Eyes carry more of the performance than anything else on a face. Each one is finished by hand, because the difference between believable and unsettling lives in details this small.
Waitlist members get each update by email before it goes public, plus first access when the Kickstarter opens.
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