Toy Prototype
Presenting.......The Sekhem of Osiris!
Check out the site. (still under construction)
View setup
February 15, 2007
February 08, 2007
Toy Idea
Christian Bovine. Yasmin Elayat.
We like puzzles, brain teasers, and thinking games.
Abstract
We all enjoy murder mysteries, cracking codes, and deciphering brain teasers. The process of collecting clues that will help you inch closer and closer to the answer, the main goal, is thrilling and addictive.
Our idea is a mystery box series, in which the boxes are puzzles in themselves. The users have to solve riddles, find clues, figure out brain teasers, experience an entire journey, until they reach the goal, the main concept, the answer.
The goal of the box is to try to unlock the box - get to the center, the next clue. Once the user has retrieved the clue, they can move on to the next level, i.e. the next box. The series will increase in difficulty and will cover different types of puzzles and riddles, making it a real detective process, where the user will collect clues, and artifacts along the way, until they build the final collectible toy.
Different Concepts
We have different ideas of how the users can unlock the series of boxes:
1) Puzzle is self-contained on the box
2) Puzzle is on-line which will reveal a code/combination to open the box
3) Non-traditional keys that open the box
We will need to research what people would enjoy more.
Once the box is unlocked, we have two different ideas of how to continue the journey:
1) The box itself becomes a piece of a larger puzzle
2) There is an item, or a part of a toy, in the box that is another piece to another larger puzzle
Age Groups
We are targeting different age groups by having different levels and goals for these box-series. These are our intial ideas for the levels:
1) Increasing difficulty
2) Age appropriate
3) Educational
4) Themed
Roadblock
Our major problem is creating a story behind the puzzle-box journey, in order to create a context for the process. Why would people want to conquer these puzzles? What would motivate them? What kind of toy, or constructable object, would people of different age groups want to try to collect?
Research
These are different toys, puzzles, games on the market that could be relevant to our idea:
Our goal is to construct a toy through the process of collecting artifacts from the series of puzzle-boxes; similar to the idea of the Voltron toy, which is composed of smaller toys:
Age appropriate toys - Research
We were supposed to talk to professionals, educators, child psychologists about what toys are appropriate at what age. We want to be able to classify toys by specific groups of children.
Below is a table summary of our findings of the 6 - 8 year old age group:
Amplification Toy - an Elongated Neck
We decided to amplify a child's perspective on the world by simulating an elongated neck. Our idea is to create this fun monster head that has large, twistable, movable eye pipes that behave like periscopes, where a child can navigate his way through the world by looking through these new eyes.
We created a prototype using tubing and a construction helmet. TODO: Add pic of it.
Here is a (slightly) horrendous mockup of our idea:
