After fleshing out my design and the beginning of the fabrication/building, I am starting to hone in on what I think I can realistically achieve by the end of this project and some possible constraints that have popped up along the way.

5 Specifications

1. Museum Aesthetic – Luckily to achieve this I can take the easy route of copying what has been done thousands of times before me. I’ve looked in different museum displays and found some common themes between them. They often use white to really accentuate light and give a clean look. They are also minimalist in style, displays for helmets and masks rarely contain anything more than the item itself so that should be easy enough to replicate.
2. “Floating” Illusion – I covered this more in depth in my last post on what exactly this is and how I’ll achieve it, but I want this to be apart of the design because I think the illusion, when pulled off well, can be seamless and it would really give an extra layer of meaning to the project rather than sitting on an obvious stand.
3. Reasonable size – This was something that came up more as I got into the design phase, but I wanted this to be something I could place in my room without it being a complete burden to have around. Due to this, I slightly designed it to fit on my book shelf as that seemed like the most reasonable metric to go off of for current and future placement.
4. Hidden Lights – I want the lights I’m putting in to not be obviously. Luckily, I believe I can hide them pretty seamlessly in the base but I think if the light strips were obvious and sticking out then it would detract from the overall museum/clean aesthetic.
5. Name Plate – Since this is acting as a memorial, I thought it would add to the overall museum aesthetic to have a museum style name plate with some general info and dates on it. This is the one part of my project I am a little stuck on but plan to laser cut the plate into something.

5 Restraints

1. Limited 3D printing – I was initially going to 3D print the base and the mask but figured that would be too many 3D printed aspects for the overall project. That combined with the large cost that would be associated with doing that pushed me away from relying on 3D printing.
2. Overall size – I delved into this a little in my reasonable size specification but I thought it was also restraint driven. Once again, I want this to be able to fit fairly seamlessly in whatever room it ends up in the near future so I cannot make it overly large.
3. Shipping – Since I decided against 3D printing the mask, I put my faith in an etsy seller for a high quality mask. However, since this is a private seller I do not have a lot of information on when it will arrive. I plan to have everything ready to go by the time it gets here, but the clock is slowly ticking on that sadly.
4. Orientation – I don’t want there to be wires coming out or the guts exposed so I either need to hide all the wires/metal very well to keep that illusion, this limits some of the extra space I have plus how I can place everything together.
5. Power Supply – I decided to pick some lights that plugged into the wall rather than being battery powered. I did this so I could keep it on continuously without having to change out batteries but that is going to require it being next to an outlet to get the full effect.