The two swords that I built for me and maxes fencing game was a long and frustrating proccess because it took a lot of glue patience, and redoing to actually complete. What I made was two swords that go with a chestplate that max had built when it hits something like for example the other sword it lights up a different color. In addition to that the swords have rounded edges as to not hurt anyone but they are hard enough to trigger the chestplate that max made. Max's chestplate is actually pretty cool and works well with my swords. What it is is a round circle-like chestplate that straps around your chest, and it has lives. Whenever someone hits the chestplate like say with my sword then it loses I heart. It has 3 hearts and whoever loses all the hearts loses the game. Although it was pretty hard with all the glue redoing and coding that came into the swords, I really like it and think the game is what the other team asked for and it works pretty much perfectly. I actually like it so much I wanted to take it home. And that was my project!

The third studio was the Interactive body/motion games. In this studio my group was asked to create a game that would involve some motion elements and incorporate our bodies. We were given a sketch of a game by another group within this studio in which we determined the sketch was about a “bat” and a lighting up “ball”. Once we came to this conclusion the group began to brainstorm. My partnered decided he wanted to create the baseball bat, which meant I was left with the ball.

Creating a ball was not so simple. It had a very long process into making it. Firstly, I had to calculate the size of the ball with the container it was going to be molded with. Once all of these calculations were done, I created a clay version of the ball. The making of the mold was very tedious mainly for the fact that the ball and the container had to be completely covered in vaseline. This would prevent the plaster sticking to the container and the ball. When the ball and container were done being vaselined, the plaster mixture was then put into the container with the ball. The plaster could only cover half the ball so that there could be two halfs to the mold.The plaster needed to dry for the molding process to continue. When the plaster was dry it also had to be covered in vaseline so it could be cracked open. With the plaster being completely covered in vaseline, the second amount was then added until it completely covered up the clay ball. Straws were added in with this process to make holds in the cast for a different mold later on. The plaster was done drying, and it was then cracked open to create the mold. The clay ball was then removed.

Moving onto the second step of creating the ball, the electronics inside of it had to be built. The main ingredient to these custom made electronics is the momentary switch. It is a switch in when its pushed all the way in it closes the electrical circuit and when it is not pressed the circuit is closed. Summed up, when its pressed a light with turn on and when its not in contact with anything the light would be off. Wires, solder, watch batteries, and L.E.Ds were the other materials in this contraption. Using precise soldering the wires were connected to the momentary switch, then soldered to the L.E.D and battery. Four of the lights were made. The purpose of these lights and the way they were made is that when the ball was hit by the bat the ball would light up. The focus of the game would be what colors you could get to light up: blue, green, red, orange.

After the construction of the lights, they were then used in the final molding process. Having the mold all ready to go the custom lights were put inside of it. Then a see-through liquid rubber substance was poured into the mold. When the rubber was dry, it was taken out of the mold creating a ball. When the ball was squeezed or hit the lights would light up. The ball came out as a success and did not break when hit by the bat. The mold is still intact for any future projects that may involve a custom made ball.

The design brief was to create a toy based on a crayon drawing received from another group. Matt and Ellis gave us the drawing pictured above. We interpreted the toy to be a ball which would light up when thrown, and its color would signify how to the other player would react to it.

We decided that the best way to create a ball which could withstand the wear and tear of being thrown and kicked would be to create a frame and surround it with a soft material.

The frame went through two iterations, first we only three rings, this proved to not offer enough support. The second iteration had five rings and was much more stable. This method of making the frame allowed us to create a smashed geometric net of the ball on rhino, which we could then laser cut from foam fold around the ball.

The electronics and programming proved to be very challenging. Because the ball could not be wired, but the prompts would need to come from the computer screen, it was necessary to use a wireless XBEE, the XBEE had to be paired with the arduino in the ball and this proved to be very challenging as the XBEEs were very finicky. The programming was challenging because it was necessary to make the program wait for a certain amount of time before displaying something, but the wait command had been removed from the processing language and some very complicated nested loops were needed to get around the issue.

The final product, after two days of work, was a multi player game, where you would pass the ball and depending on the color shown, you would either "knee"  or catch the ball.  The structure consists of 5 rings laser cut into 1mm plastic material, with notches to stabilize them into place.  The sphere structure is covered by 8 foam strips laser cut to fit the circumference of the rings.  The strips are hot glued together and onto the plastic ring edges.  One of the strips is detachable through velcro.  The detachable feature allows accessibility to the electronics inside.  Two extra foam circles are hot glued to the top and bottom of the ball where the foam strips meet.  There are pipe cleaners that cover up the glue, and add a little texture. 

    The electronics inside consist of an arduino, an XBEE (that connects to the wifi), an accelerometer, and a battery.  With this setup velcroed down in the ball, it connects to the application on the computer which is called Processing.  With all these electronics programmed, the computer waits for the ball to be still for approximately two seconds, then shows either red or blue.  When the color appears, the person throws the ball.  The other person must either knee or catch the ball.  Red means catch it, and blue means knee it.  Once the person has the ball still in their hands, the process repeats.