Have you ever wanted to try your hand at coding? Perhaps you’d like to witness 3D printing in action?
Or maybe, you’re just interested in watching a robot battle to the death.
Either way, Toronto’s annual Maker Festival is where it’s all taking place.
The two-day fair will feature the works of more than 100 “makers” who invent, create, and push the boundaries of what is possible.
According to its website, the Maker Festival “brings together Toronto’s most creative people and projects, in order to inspire openness to possibilities, a sense of active participation in shaping our world, and a yearning for a more wonder-filled tomorrow.”
Jenn Dodd, the executive director of the festival, said the event will include exhibitors who are still in the brainstorming phase, those who have a created a preliminary model of their invention, and makers who have already produced a final product.
“Everything from prototypes to something cobbled together in their garage to somebody who’s in a startup who’s selling something to art exhibits,” she told CTVNews.ca in June.
The event has been running for the past five years and relies entirely on its hundreds of volunteers.
“Everybody here is doing it because we love it and have fun,” Dodd said. “It’s not exactly a big money-making enterprise that we’re going to take elsewhere.”
Most of the makers will encourage visitors to their booths to interact with their projects, whether it’s holding up something to look at it more closely or creating a new project of their own, Dodd said.
From building your own pinball machine to interacting with a giant acrylic poplar tree to metal casting with sand, the Maker Festival puts emphasis on hands-on participation. In fact, all of the exhibits must include a physical component for people to see or touch, Dodd said.
“It’s a pretty fantastic opportunity for people to see stuff they’ve often never seen before and more importantly, a chance for them to get involved in something they would like to try out for themselves,” she said.
Robots fight to the death
In addition to interactive opportunities, Dodd said this year’s festival has focused on large-scale installations that may be on the more “artistic and beautiful experiential side.”
For example, one exhibit called “Connect & Sync; Hands & Hearts” by wonderMakr involves four giant balloons with visualized heart rate patterns, resembling an EKG graph, hanging from them. The balloons will rise up and down at different speeds based on the individual heart rates of participants who place their hands on panels connected to the balloons.
According to the Maker Festival’s website, the installation is intended to challenge people to connect with each other by syncing their hearts rates and moving the balloons together.
Another installation, simply titled “Storm” by Tristan Sauer aims to simulate the experience of a thunderstorm. Using coding and electronic parts, the piece will create clouds that can communicate with each other through Bluetooth receivers. They will flash warm light to imitate lightning and there will be a speaker that emits the loud sound of a clap of thunder.
The intention is to turn any space into a thunderstorm, according to the website.
Another exhibit sure to be a hit among attendees is the BotBrawl Robot Fighting League by Great Canadian BotBrawl.
“It is what it sounds like,” Dodd said with a laugh.
The Battle Royale-style event will see robots, which weigh between one and three pounds, fight each other to the death in a specially constructed bullet-proof arena.
The small robots will battle at the Maker Festival in Toronto. (Source: Richard Walsh)
‘It’s kind of nuts’
The festival has also introduced several new attractions, including an area dedicated to small companies and startups called Jump Start Alley.
“This is a focus on makers who have a small business or are just getting started, maybe have a prototype, or had a Kickstarter, or are just in the setting out stages,” she said.
Dodd said the idea is to help these up and comers gain more exposure to succeed.
One of the projects featured in Jump Start Alley is called a “Cinevinyl Recordjector” and it’s one of Dodd’s favourites because as she puts it, “it’s kind of nuts.”
The invention combines a Super 8 film projector and a vinyl record player. The film projection syncs with the record player so that the audience can enjoy an “analog music experience,” according to a description on the festival website.
In addition to Jump Start Alley, the festival has introduced a new feature called Makers on Film., which allow the event to feature projects that are “either too big or too dangerous,” according to the website.
In one film, a maker builds Haida canoes from giant red cedars; while another film is about a musical instrument that uses 2,000 marbles, and yet another is about a community that builds really tall bikes.
Despite some of the complicated science and technology, Dodd said having fun is really at the heart of the Maker Festival.
“We’d love to have people come out. We do this for the love of it, all the makers do, and we just want to share it with as many people,” she said.
The Toronto Maker Festival runs from July 7-8 at the Toronto Reference Library. Follow CTV News on Facebook and Instagram for a tour of the festival on Saturday, July 7.
