Paint Party was a physical installation that harnessed the power of Android to control a giant, custom-built, paint-flinging robot that allowed all 7,000 attendees to create art together. Anyone could control the robot with an Android phone to flick paint on the massive canvas (a four-by-fourmeter rotating cube). The robot mimicked every movement in real time.

Paint Party was brought to life in a 4500-pound physical installation where attendees used an Android Nexus 6P to control a robotic arm that flicked paint at a giant cube. The project took six weeks to complete and was a collaboration between robotic engineers, music technologists, creatives, Android developers and more. Java was used to develop the control app, along with native Android APIs, which fed inputs from touch, the gyroscope and the accelerometer into the robot (brought to life by Rhino 3D and the Kuka PRC plug-in).

Over the course of the three-day event, attendees used over 100 gallons of paint, spun the cube over 10,000 times, made 3,000-plus flings and painted 60 panels that were displayed as art across the festival’s landscape. One in 10 attendees posted about Paint Party and there were 1.3 million posts, shares and likes about it.