BamBOO – Cassandra Du – Andy Garcia
bamBOO
CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE
In my previous research, we had a very meaningful story, but it was not very interactive. I have looked through several projects, such as The Table, and other interactive art pieces. What I noticed was that people were interested in the things they seem to recognize. For example, when you see an art piece that triggers a moment in your life, you will want to know more about it. That was when I realized that interaction means that people are actively engaging with someone or something. With that said, I was inspired by Demon Slayer and Spy Family, which are two very popular anime. My concept was to have an escape room within a maze. My targeted audience are people who love escape rooms and being able to solve complicated puzzles. It would be too difficult to have an escape puzzle in a maze, so I made a safe mini version that is just as fun.
CONCEPTION AND DESIGN
Since our project was based on an anime, I wanted to make each interaction a little more 3D. When people watch these shows, there are times they want to step in and do it themselves. Thus, we wanted them to be able to get hands-on interactions. However, we do not have an actual maze for people to walk into, so we came up with the little figure. You control the figure using a stick that is under the maze. In that way, it makes it more difficult to finish the maze, just like how a real life maze would be like. We mainly used magnets to activate the traps and move the figure. Magnets gave the maze more of a mysterious feeling, as you do not know when you will activate the traps. For instance, when you activate one of the traps, the demon will pop up, and you will begin to fight it with the mini katana. We previously thought of using a button game, but that did not fit the concept of our maze.
FABRICATION AND PRODUCTION
While assembling our project together, we prioritized on building the maze first, and then figuring out the codes later. Which turned out to be a big problem, but it was nothing we could not solve. I focused on putting the maze together and making sure none of the wires would block the stick. As a group, we came up with what traps to set and where they should be placed. During the User Testing Session, we ran into a problem with the maze, and how the magnets were not connecting together. Some of our traps were confusing to the people as well. Therefore, we added more magnets to our little figure and changed the traps to make it more understandable. We took the risk and added a bit of 3D to the 2D world. The temperature and demon slaying traps were crucial to our project. Without those traps, it would have just been a normal maze and has nothing to do with our inspiration. Learning to control an LED with a temperature sensor was very difficult. It was hard to control the LED and have it only light up at a certain time.
CONCLUSION
The purpose of this project was to make something fun that can give people a sense of nostalgia. When people played our game, they seemed to forget about everything else and only had their mind on the game. Many people were curious about it because of our concept of using Demon Slayer. Interaction is a way to keep people engaged with something or someone, and my project was able to achieve that. However, we had to do a little more explaining on how to play the game, which made it not as interactive. The game was a bit confusing, but the competitiveness to get to the end made people want to keep playing. If I had more time, I wanted to create a robotic arm that killed the demon, instead of having to grab a sword. We had a lot of ideas, but just not enough time to put them all together. I learned that sometimes simple is the best. Since we had so many ideas, putting them into one was not the best way to do it. Seeing that people had fun, I felt very encouraged.
