Pressure Project 3: Puzzle Box
Posted: April 2, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Isadora, Pressure Project, Pressure Project 3 Leave a comment »Well uh the thing is is that the project didn’t work. The idea was for a box to have a puzzle entirely solvable without any outside information. Anyone with any background can have a fair chance at solving the puzzle. So, because I am not a puzzle making extraordinaire, I had to take inspiration from elsewhere. It just so happens that a puzzle with just those requirements was gifted to me as a gift from my Grandpa. It is called a Caesar’s Codex. The puzzle works by presenting the user with a four rows of symbols that can slide up and down then right next to it is a single column of symbols. Then on the back is a grid full of very similar symbols to the ones with the four rows. Finally, their are symbols on the four sides that are similar to the ones on the column next to the four rows.
Now the challenge is to get this fully mechanical system to interact with the user interface created in Isadora. The solution was to use a Makey Makey kit. So the wat the user moves the pieces to solve the puzzle needed to change, but the hints to solve the puzzle needed to stay the same. The mechanical puzzle requires flipping the box over constantly to find the right symbol on the grid and then flip it over again to move the row to the right position. I opted to just have the grid portion be set up to directly solve the puzzle.
The paperclips are aligned in a grid like pattern for the users to follow. There is one unique paperclip color to indicate the start. The binder clips are used to indicate when an alligator clip needs to be attached to the paperclip. When the alligator clip is attached to the right paper clip, the screen shown on Isadora will change. Unfortunately, I never tested whether or not the paperclips were conductive enough. I assumed they would, but the coating on the paper clips was resistive enough to not allow a current to flow through them. So, lesson learned, always test everything before it is too late to make any changes, or you make your entire design based on it.
Pressure Project 3–Allison Smith
Posted: March 3, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Pressure Project 3 Leave a comment »For our third pressure project, we were asked to share a story of importance to us and relevant to our cultural heritage, and to share this story primarily through audio. Additional goals were to tell someone a new story, to make someone laugh, and to make the experience interactive. Alex gave us the freedom to define cultural heritage for ourselves; we all grow up in a specific culture…whatever that may mean to us. I decided to focus on my family’s culture growing up, because I believe that is something that particularly shaped me into the way I am today. I also chose to look up the definition of heritage, as I find definitions very helpful to me. Here’s one definition that stood out to me:
Something transmitted by or acquired by a predecessor
I brainstormed passions that I have that were heavily influenced by my family environment, and the biggest one that stood out to me was art. In my family, there were also several mediums used to engage in art, and I wanted to give the participants that variety in my story telling, so I chose three art mediums that I felt were influenced by my family’s interests. Within that, I discerned what we were specifically passionate about within each medium. As you can see in my notes, I chose Musical theatre because of its immersion in a new world, movies because of the creative processes of facilitating deeper meanings, and music because of how its dynamics could be played with for expression.
One of the overall threads I have seen in art is its deeper meaning and space for interpretation. So, in my different approaches of sharing my stories, I didn’t want to clearly communicate the specific passions of each art medium. I chose to imply what I appreciated through the way it was communicated. These are the sound samples I used for each short story:
Then, I added an intro and transition. Focused on the theme of art, I made the intro a bit more poetic sounding, and the transition was focused on discovery:
Finally, I wanted to make this interactive. In order to explore each medium, I provided a small object that represented it for me, and used those as triggers by connecting them through the MakeyMakey. I used a guitar pick for music, and SD card for film, and lipstick for musical theatre. My peers explained that having this textural connection to the audio helped them connect more to the audio and immersed them more in each of the stories.
In Isadora, I had the intro play with my cue, then opening the gate to let people play around with the different objects. Using the keyboard watcher, each object triggered the sound, and then when the loop ended, it went into the counter. When the counter was between 1 and 2, it triggered the transition audio, and then after all of the audios had been listening, putting a 3 into the counter, there was no longer a transition audio cued.
I originally wasn’t very excited about this pressure project, as I prefer to have more longevity in my projects, and this one was meant to be shorter, and I also am not a huge fan of more light-hearted, comedic projects. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by the enjoyment I got from creating this and seeing it play out with my peers. I’ve attached a video of the full experience.