my time at the magic place

Our Toy Design Workshop hosted a play-testing session with a group of 2nd graders last week.  It went well, was fun, and we learned a lot.  Below are my classmates with their toys prior to the craziness.

Greg Borenstein and I have been steadily working on this project for several weeks now.  It’s starting to look like a game.  We’re still going to polish the overall functionality, and then build a Pamplona street diorama.  Further, we’re going to experiment with the idea of the players seeing the game on a monitor with an up close view of the bulls rushing straight toward them.  I’ll post more documentation as we complete the project.

Phase 1 of play testing for People Watching Plus, the final project for Big Games.

Working with Katherine Keane on a project involving eye tracking. She keeps saying, “This is actually not a good controller because you only see what you’re looking at.”  It’s funny, but true.  So, we’re working on some ideas that track the pupil, and hope to synch this up with some other media.

Really nice day trip up the Hudson River Line to Beacon to look at and play the old games.  If it hadn’t been ten bucks an hour we would have stayed all day.  The owner, Fred Bobrow, is an interactive designer himself, and he was kind enough to open up several of the games for us, and explain how they worked.  Each game had a sort of little trick or two in the way the game worked.  Many use mirrors, and the game is set upward inside the height of the game so that it gives the illusion of further depth into the console toward the wall.  Greg Borenstein also blogged on our trip up there with more pictures and thoughts about individual games.

What good would a class called Big Games be

without playing Capture the Flag?

It was a nice moment

to take over Washington Square Park

and all be big kids running in a slightly more complex version of Tag.

Classmates were sprinting, falling, sliding, laughing, scheming…it was fun, but more importantly, it reminded me to allow myself to just be a kid more often.

(Each team’s flag was a keyboard from the junk shelf.  No keyboards were damaged for this game.)

This is nearly finished without any aesthetic additions which I originally planned to add, and still might. Many of the parts in this little project might appear to be only aesthetic choices (i.e. the arches and the little sky plane), but every part has some sort of practical purpose, except the human figure.

I failed to complete a few aspects of the mechanism. The cams didn’t serve the function they were supposed to, which was to pop up the lily pad shaped obstacles. My solution for that was the little sloped piece over the rotating arm shown in the second segment of the video, however I only completed one pop-up obstacle, and the other three remain lifeless. I think I’ll take a classmate’s suggestion and use the cams to create some floating/bouncing clouds behind the little sky-plane. The skyplane was built as a balancing mechanism for the stability of the human figure, which worked, but then took away the lateral-motion-detail-work I was trying for with the wheel and the narrow path. As a result, I had to cut the path wider, and take out the spots where the figure ran into a curve, which was a failure since I was going for the curvy path motion. To fix this in a future model, I’d use a more rigid path structure, and a much more rigid arm structure, as well as a more substantial wheel, and more carefully designed slopes for the path. Lastly, my large gear running the mechanism jammed a lot, forcing me to cut off several of the wooden pegs thereby losing the fluid motion it could have otherwise had. Clearly, in the future I’ll either be far more careful in designing the gears, or simply use pre-made gears that I know will work.

Stage 4 was all about getting the center island in place.  It might appear as though the arches are an aesthetic choice (everyone seems to think this is a McDonald’s statement, or something about St. Louis, which worries me a bit) but the arches are the only way to hold up the center piece.  (Sure, the shape could have been different, but the arch is a pretty sound structure to choose for obvious (historical, mathematical, architectural and otherwise) reasons.)  Any sort of under structure would intersect with the rotating arm.  So, the arches are pragmatic.  Also pictured is the wheel to give the walker a lateral motion as he guides around the curvy path.  And, the underside of the pop-up obstacles.

I continue to learn a lot with this project.  I started with a really open-ended plan, and it has come together in a sort of passable fashion as far as I can tell.  But, far more importantly, I feel like I could actually pre-plan and design a much more successful automaton as a result of this exercise.  And, something tells me I’ll probably tackle that challenge sometime soon.

One of the reasons I jumped onto the magical bus of ITP was to learn how to make things move.  For this midterm assignment I am inspired by the types of automata seen on Cabaret Mechanical Theater and Flying Pig. I’ve also spent hours watching and re-watching every Arthur Ganson video I can find.

After some initial frustration deciding on the form, function, and design of the exact mechanism I want to make, I decided to jump in, start building, and see where that led me. Consequently, the the result of stage 1 is what you see here.  These are the beginnings of the guts of a hand-cranked kinetic sculpture.  The form this takes will be following the functionality that I come up with as I continue to add movable parts and create a robust infrastructure. Currently, there is a cam, of sorts, and one gear on the left that will turn another gear, pictured (in the white tube) but upside down.  The gears work together to spin the central pole that will have at least one arm containing a rotating object. I will continue to post documentation as this project unfolds.

This is only the beginning.

Progress will be documented.

Today in Toy design we had a really nice visit from Michael Joaquin Grey.  His compelling story was quite inspiring.  He talked about his development as an artist, various obstacles, ideas generated within the context of modernism and post-modernism, and ultimately his invention of a building toy called Zoobs.

Admittedly, I walked into the class and saw Michael’s toys lined up on a table and thought, “Cool, another Lego knockoff.”  And within a few minutes of his discussion, I understood my own naivete in thinking Lego covers the ground of all building toys.  The Zoob connectors come in 5 varieties and connect in the 5 types of joints that all our bones connect in.  Mr. Grey spent years developing Zoobs in an effort to create a toy that would be able to model the living world in all its complexity.  If this sort of toy appeals to you at all, I recommend investigating Zoobs a little more.