Peter’s Painting Pressure Project (3)

For our final pressure project, we were told to use physical “dice” in some way and create an interactive system.  I took that prompt and interpreted it to make use of coins!

So the first obstacle to overcome was to figure out how to get coins to communicate digital signals to my media system.  I really wanted to encourage users to flick coins from afar, so I got a box for coins to be tossed into.  Then, I lined the inside of the box with tinfoil strips.  Every other strip was connected to ground, and every other strip was connected to a digital input on an Arduino microcontroller.  So using this, every time a coin landed in the box, it would output a potentially different keyboard button press to the host computer, appearing seemingly random!

Next I needed to decide how to produce a response from the system to the coin-tossing input.  I really enjoy the idea of splattering paint on a canvas, a la Jackson Pollock, and wanted to capture something similar as a result of the chaos of tossing coins and their unpredictability that results.  So depending on where the coin lands, a colour associated with that location will begin radiating from a random position on-screen.  This creates a really interesting splattering effect when the coin initially lands, as it rattles the other coins in the box, outputting a wide range of signals in rapid succession.

A neat observation made by the group was that it really encourages passersby to engage with the system as it produces dynamic and vibrant colours.  Since the main way to interface is tossing in coins, it would also turn a pretty nice profit, too!  Haha 🙂