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The Life of Steve

A web-based, Minecraft-themed, interactive story.

Liyang Zhu

https://s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com/ima.nyu.edu/commlab/leon/tom/index.html

Description

Minecraft is a very classic and popular sandbox game. It gives the player an extremely high degree of freedom. In the game, players can do anything and have a myriad of very different lives.

In this project, I produced a web-based interactive story and set the account in the context of Minecraft. To give users an immerse experience of Minecraft, the style of the web page is a parody of Minecraft, and all of the images are screenshots from Minecraft. Moreover, inheriting Mincraft's high degree of freedom, this interactive story allows players to make a variety of choices midway through the story and has more than one end, which means the story is not a fixed one! Furthermore, to make the experience more fun, I even added random factors, so that one specific choice may have different results.

The story told by this project can be seen as the story of a hero who becomes powerful step by step and eventually defeats a demon; it can also be seen as a typical development path for a player in Minecraft.

From a technical point of view, the project uses the concept of modules. While the page contains a lot of smooth transitions, all the animations are encapsulated and can be called up quickly. It allows me to add functionality and beautify the visuals while keeping the code neat.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.120.7
Communications Lab
Narrative/Storytelling,Play/Games
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Music Wheel

A rotating electronic music box.

Haorui Li, Liyang Zhu

https://youtu.be/wtYCK3cwIN0

Description

It is common for music boxes to be powered by spiral springs while the plectrums make the sound. However, we are thinking of the possibility of combining the idea of the music box with the electromagnetics we learned in our course – Working with Electrons. Our project is basically an electronic music box that rotates like a sky wheel. As a result, we named it “Music Wheel”.

This project requires a comprehensive understanding of the motors (especially the stepper motors which we are using in this project), NE555 timer, operations on Arduino, PCB design, and also basic circuit operations. To make a speaker produce sounds, one of the ways is to use a NE555 oscillating circuit. In order to make multiple frequencies of sounds, we decide to attach the resistances with different values to the different axles of the wheel. When the wheel rotates, we can switch the resistance connected to the NE555 IC and produce a different sound.

However, the trickiest part of our project, is the stepper motor. Basically, a stepper motor is a kind of motor that can rotate certain steps in response to the electric signal given to it. The advantage of this kind of motor is that it produces almost no noise (compared to brush motor). And to produce such a set of electric signals, we need to use Arduino and ULN2003 IC to make it work – a challenging work.

Lastly, as an art piece, it also takes us a lot of time working on the delicate design of the wooden structure of our wheel. We have looked through some of the world’s most famous sky wheels and learn from their grant but well-organized design.

Student information: Tom Zhu (tomzhu@nyu.edu), Harry Lee (harrylee@nyu.edu)

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.130.1
Working with electrons
Art,Music