SUNTRIAL was featured at the 2011 Come Out and Play Festival on Governor’s Island.
SunTrial is a fast-paced strategy game based around light collection. The game is played on a field with 5 checkpoints and uses custom solar-powered game pieces (Sun Disks). The Sun Disks allow teams to collect sunlight and easily track their scores. Two teams compete by exposing their side of the Sun Disk to collect light. Players must be careful, however! Too much sun exposure causes the dial on the disk to reset, costing the teams valuable points.
Rules of the Game
Objective: Two teams of light collectors, Orange and Blue, fight to get the most points across 5 sun disks by exposing them to sunlight.
Setup:
5 checkpoints on a field arranged in an x, with a disk at each checkpoint.
There are 8 players, 4 on each team.
Each game round is timed.
Time is kept by a referee.
The Disks:
Each disk has an Orange and Blue side.
Each side has a solar panel and a score-keeping dial.
The sun-facing side collects light, which causes the dial to advance.
To change your score, expose your side of the disk to the sun.
The dial ticks up to 6, then goes back down, so watch out!
Check on all your disks by running around the playing field.
Tagging:
There is a tagging zone around each checkpoint.
You can tag a player on the opposite team while they are in the tagging zone in order to stop them from interfering with the disk.
When you tag an opposing player, you both have to leave the tagging zone!
You can’t guard the disks.
You can’t visit the same checkpoint twice in a row.
Scoring:
At the end of gameplay, the number on your dial is your point value for the disk.
Add up the total on all the disks for your final score.
putting the game pieces together:
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Old iterations:
Sundisk is a competitive team-based game about capturing light.
Game pieces: solar-powered disks spread on the ground.
Each disk has two functional sides, with counters (powered with motors that receive their power from sunlight) dynamically displaying the teams’ scores. The goal is to get your counter to move from 1-5, but not past 5. If it moves past 5, it resets to 1.
Side A powers Team 1′s counter, Side B powers Team 2′s counter.
Capturing enough light triggers the motor to turn a bit and increment the team’s counter.
Players need to run around and flip disks over to catch light advantageously for their team.
The team with the most points after a period of play will win the game!
Strategy:
Strategy enters into the game because each disk will have a solar panel on each side. Team counts can go up to a point before they start going down again. Players will have to determine what will be more beneficial for their team: flip the disk so that their team is gathering light (and hopefully gaining points) or flip the disk so that their opponents are gathering light (and hopefully losing points after passing the threshold).
Metrics for success:
Becky and I have fairly simple metrics for success:
* Do our disks function? The circuitry is just a simple miller engine, so we want to build something that won’t break when roughly flipped. If our disks don’t function accurately and reliably, then we don’t have a successful game!
* Are our disks durable? Since we anticipate reckless flipping of our disks we need to carefully consider scratching and durability. Excessive scratching on the surface could affect how much light reaches the solar cells, so it is especially important that we choose durable, scratch resistant materials.
* Are the disks aesthetically appealing? Since the circuitry is fairly simple we think the look and feel of the disks should be exceptional!
* Is the game simple enough for pickup games? Games with a lot of rules have a higher level on entry for casual players. We need to strike a balance between simplicity and clear, challenging, compelling rules.
* Is the game fun? Perhaps most importantly, we want this game to be fun! If it’s not fun, then we will have completely missed the mark.
Materials:
We are as of yet unsure what materials we will specifically use for the construction of the disks, but we know we are going to make a Miller Engine as outlined by Solarbotics. Ideally we’d like to use a dual-shaft motors inside each disk (so we can display team points on both sides of the disk), something like this motor.
Here is a list of possible parts for the miller engine:
WhatMappr: a project by Meghan Hoke and Becky Kazansky
WhatMappr is a mapping platform that utilizes 3-D in processing with 3 sensors: GPS, a potentiometer, and switch, to create multi-layered, idiosyncratic maps that compare “perceived location” to “GPS location”. As you walk around, you turn the potentiometer knob to the right or left to mark your movements. GPS pings 1 pulse per second, and as the GPS shield is set on an arduino and the analog sensors are input through the GPS shield, their output of values is also at a rate of 1x per second.
A second analog sensor going through the GPS shield is a photocell which “records” amounts of ambient light as you proceed on your route. After all values are input to a text file, you can view a 3-D visualization of the GPS and Perceived Routes. The ambient light values are plotted on the map as a line representing the average of the GPS Route and the Perceived Route lines. High values of ambient light produce a feeling of “depth”, and colors go from a dark blue(dark) to yellow(light).
One of the more interesting lessons coming from our experiments was the discovery that often GPS is hilariously wrong. A look at GPS line vs. Perceived line showed the reading from the manually controlled potentiometer to often be more accurate.
Testing it outside in the cold:
Raw data for GPS Log:
Around Washington Square: Plain GPS Map Log:
Around Washington Square: Processing Sketch in 3D with photocell and potentiometer:
Our original plan was actually to record spikes in RF or Wifi in the surrounding area (and even this concept was a result of several revisions from before; we actually started with wanting to create an anti-tech device that would show you where you could go to be free of certain types of radiation. The output was actually supposed to be in audio. Because of subsequent problems with finding adequate sensors (oh boy, RF is…fun)….we ended up with just a photocell, designed to read the the values coming from the LEDs on the RF sensor.
What do you know, this concept ended up being interesting enough as a stand-alone, but I think both Meghan and I are interested in developing our concept further, to create a sort of citizen mapping or educational platform; with a device that you could snap various modules onto (for, say, air quality) and gain a different sense of your environment.
One of my concerns as we put the last iteration into development was whether this device should ultimately provide real time data or if it held equal value as a repository. It seems fairly obvious that we’re trending towards increasingly networked objects and real-time data visualizations. Instantaneous output of information into accessible visualizations provides obvious “magic” appeal, along with enabling the user to modify their behavior within a real-time feedback loop. What then, going forward, is the value for slow data?
The reasons we went with “slow data” were at least partially logistical:
-We assumed that using bluetooth or xbee wouldn’t be feasible once the user was out of good range of the receiver (which would be small in an area as laden with interference as NOHO/NYU.
-The “analog” aspect; logging your route via “left”, “right”,”stop”,”go” with a potentiometer did not seem easily translatable to a “flat” phone interface.
Philosophical reasoning:
-We thought the process of acquiring slow data from a dedicated device could be gratifying in a way that real-time information does not facilitate, as it is easily subsumed w/in the noise of the real-time data stream.
-Creating a slower behavioral feedback loop in which a user goes out with a dedicated device, then comes back and inputs the information to a visualization program makes the activity more ritualistic and possibly more significant/conscious.
I think that in order to give this concept a continuing vitality, a jump into cross-platform networking of data would be necessary.
One thing that astounds me is how many paths you can take to arrive at a similar destination: After presenting our project in Pcomp, I became aware incidentally of, at my count, three other projects in development this semester with similar concerns and outputs. One of these projects focused on recording ambient light as an end in itself, but utilized video to arrive at mappable values instead of our photocell. It’s extremely captivating, visually, becoming both a video project and sensor experiment . Another project senses air quality via stationary sculpture; the idea fitting within the vision of an urban grid full of embedded sensors. The third project I discovered seems to have the widest scope; with the idea of creating an interchangeable sensor module platform. It seems most in-line with what I envisioned to be the future of our project. Each of the projects is fascinating, and seems to have sprouted from widely disparate starting points.
Our ideas seem to coalesce around:
-DIY graphing of environmental factors/visualizing the invisible
-personal quantification + route mapping on the urban grid
-responsive behavioral feedback loops via real-time locative data
It is a bit jarring to suddenly become aware of your place in the “marketplace of ideas” har har, but of course ultimately invaluable. Of course we are making similar projects! We are all in the same place at the same time and pretty much on the same wavelength. What it forces me to do is to consider what the standout elements are about Meghan’s +my project.
I feel that we didn’t really draw out any one specific aspect.
We have:
-a 3D mapping visualization that could be an app in and of itself. This would require research to figure out what exists out there and how we can contribute something unique.
Right now there are many ready-made gps visualization services, but most of them seem a bit flat, and standardized in a similar way.
-The comparison of “perceived” vs. “gps”. This seems to be more of an academic type of experiment, and maybe a bit of a one-off, unless we take the idea of “analog” mapping further.
-The dedicated device. Right now the WhatMappr is very very box like…(well, actually, I was asked if it was a bomb the other day). It does not currently communicate with arduino or android. Is there value in keeping it autonomous? Eh…..
One and Dream Chairs
Project by Becky Kazansky,Catherine McCurry, Rong Yong.
Animation by Becky Kazansky.
One And Dream Chairs is an installation consisting of a chair that transports the sitter to a peaceful place. A live video feed shows the sitter an image of themselves sitting in the chair as they transform into a tree.
Sitting down activates a pressure sensor. Placing arms on armrests activates two capacitive sensors. Layered over the sitter is an animation of the chair turning into a tree and an audio track of ambient, forest sounds.
The result is the dissociative or transporting experience of watching yourself turn into something else.
INVERTA: A Sensory Matrix Platform actuated by two users to experience themselves through each others’ tactile sense.
This “spoof” concept video was created for an assignment asking us to come up with a “fantasy device”. I don’t really dream of gadgets too often, in fact I often think about how we can make technology less about toys and substitutes, and more about platforms for expanding our physical senses.
Guiding ideas:
-Technology that you cannot use in isolation
-A device that does not substitute for sensory experience but instead amplifies + manipulates it.
Guiding ideas:
-Technology that you cannot use in isolation
-A device that does not substitute for sensory experience but instead amplifies + manipulates it.
Frame is a first attempt at using an Ultrasonic Range Finder to control video. Putting your hand in front of the sensor causes a virtual frame to change in size and zoom in and out on a live video image.
