PHYSICAL COMPUTATION
IDEATION & RESEARCH
For this project I collaborated with Wendy Ho. We want to create a Chinese New year arcade game that requires team collaboration.
Tambourine and Lion will be the main elements for this project.
Tambourine = scare away the ghost
Depends on how fast the person spin the tambourine, the faster it goes, the ghost will stayed out of lion or village further
Lion = Feed Red Envelope to lion to let lion to eat ghost away.
When lion have collect certain amount of red envelop will unlock features (?)
PROTOTYPING & PLAY TESTING
CHANGES BASED ON TESTING:
Tambourine:
Control the lion’s mouth open and close base on the energy bar’s value. If the space bar is hit multiple times the energy bar will increase. The wider the mouth is opened the more energy it consumes. When the mouth is opened at the widest the energy consumed will be slightly higher than the max value of the energy the tambourine could generate.
Placing an Arduino (connected through bluetooth) inside the tambourine and setup gyro to read and calculate when the tambourine is turned
Q: How to spin a tambourine? A: Arduino built-in Inertial Motion Unit, but only using one axis.
Q: How to control the lion's mouth open/close? A: Based on the energy bar value, In certain mouth values the lion's mouth will open up.
Lion:
Feed Red Envelope to the lion to let the lion eat the ghost away. Participants will feed the red envelopes to the lion.
Motors used to control the opening of the mouth
IR/light sensor to read when envelope is fed inside the mouth
Q: How to feed a red envelope to a lion? A: Store a light sensor(if another sensor works better in this case?) in lion's mouth.
General UI:
Lion head in the middle of the screen
Number of lives
Ghosts (UI):
Randomly spawn in from all 4 sides of the canvas and move towards middle
The spawn rate increases as time go on
Going toward the middle of the lion (destination point is middle of canvas)
Being sucked in by the lion when envelope is fed (speed of ghost increase)
When a ghost hits the lion, minus one life
Lion (UI):
Mouth opens when tambourine is turned
Mouth automatically closes when nothing is done
PHYSICAL PORTION
For the play test, we built the bare basics of what we needed for the game to be played.
We made a simple version of the lion head with cardboards with sensors intacted the way we wanted the final version to be (IR sensor attach at the insides of lower jaw; motors on the side of lower jaw to open and close the mouth). Most of the components of this worked well enough for the prototype, but the motor was a little loose and floppy at times.
We 3D printed the tambourine and placed the Arduino inside. We faced multiple problems with the tambourine. Firstly, people were turning the tambourine a lot faster and more vigorously than we anticipated, with the added weight of the Arduino and battery the balance was off and the "drum" kept falling off of the stem. So to fix this, we had to stick the stem further into the drum to secure it.
DESIGN
UI
FABRICATION
