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The trend of the future: the Boring Company – Jamie (Ziying Wang)

The trend I pick is Elon Musk’s Boring Company. Their company goal is to create door-to-door express tunnels underground to relieve nowadays traffic pressure.

Elon’s company detects that there is heavy traffic pressure going on in big cities and something must be done to relieve this pressure. Right now, as Elon claims, even though our city is built in 3d, our road network is only 2d as it’s just a single layer on the ground. In the future, he proposes a change in this situation by building up more layers for city traffic.

There are two solutions to this problem, one is building upwards, which is flying cars; another is digging downwards, which is tunneling underground. The boring company abandoned the former idea because the flying cars are just helicopter-like vehicles that can be noisy and dangerous (falling things and when traveling in harsh weathers). The latter, on the contrary, is free from all the disadvantages of flying cars.

Elon and his team picture a future scenario of different layers of tunnels built underground, there will not be just one tunnel connecting two spots but will be multiple tunnels instead, because we have infinite possibilities and resources underground. There will be car-elevators that is only the size of two parking spots in the ending of the tunnel and by having no stations in the middle the tunnel enables full speed drive throughout the journey except for the deceleration zones by the ends. This can increase the transporting speed vastly.

I like how the Boring Company demonstrates its idea through this picture. In the future, we’ll have our private cars traveling like subways, but way faster, in tunnels and we’ll get into our destinations in no time.

Elon’s team starts from this idea and have designed three prototypes for tunneling machines so far. This new machine is 14 times faster than the old one which is slow, much more expensive and bothers nearby residents. It reduces the tunneling time by replacing the diesel locomotives with electric ones, one they plan to shrink the tunnel size to size that only fits one vehicle, which would fulfill his idea of fitting more tunnels underground and eliminating traffic jams inside the tunnels.

There will also be LOOPs and HYPERLOOPs in the tunnel that works as public transportation. Loops serve for shorter distant travels, which will also prioritize pedestrians and cyclists while Hyperloops aim for longer trips that require air-friction elimination to achieve faster speed. Both types of vehicles take up to 16 passengers and will play major roles in future public transportation.

Currently, the Boring Company’s testing tunnel has reached a speed of 110mph in their testing phase, their aim for future traveling speed is 150 mph. Their aim for tunneling speed is being as fast as a snail, the traditional way of tunneling is only 1/14 speed of a snail. They plan to “beat the snail” in drilling in the future.

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Recitation 9: Final Project Process by Qianyue Fan

Since we had five people in the group, each of us critiqued four other projects.

Luke wants to make a “Magic Brush” that allows users with physical disabilities to create artworks without difficulty. The device will include various sensors of Arduino to receive sound, light and movement of the body, and turn the received data into certain styles of strokes and colors to draw beautiful paintings on the canvas in Processing. We considered it a good idea for it helps people explore the endless possibilities of art. Not only disabled people but also everyone can find some inspiration in it. The project so far is just a basic frame, and we suggested providing various art styles for users to choose from, and hoped that users could save the current picture they paint. Also, there can be some ready examples to show some amazing works done with the program, because users may have no idea about it in the very beginning.

Eugene will design a game based on Avengers. It is an arcade game for two players that includes three Marvel superheroes and Thanos. Superheroes cannot move but can decide when to attack, and Thanos must keep moving to dodge the ranged attacks. Thanos wins if staying alive in one minute, otherwise, the superheroes win. The design is simple but exciting. To make it more playable, we suggested adding ultimate attacks with fancy effects and taking the distance between both sides into consideration to improve gaming experience.

Yixuan would like to make a device to provide immersive experience in a room. Users will see a scene in the natural environment and can interact with flower-like objects. When doing so, the device plays the sound of Bianzhong, a traditional Chinese musical instrument. However, we agreed that it is difficult to make it eye-catching and attract users, so it needs further adjustments. As for the feeling of traditional Chinese culture, we thought that more instruments could be added.

Gloria will create a game to promote environment protection. Two players control a salvage ship and a whale to remove all the plastic garbage in the ocean. This is a very unique game for it encourages cooperation instead of competition. We noticed that making different pictures to show the motion of the ship and the whale might require a lot of work, but there were not any problems for the rest of the game.

Most of us share a similar definition of interaction and believe that game is the perfect way for it. But the immersive project is also in line with my definition of interaction, where the activity between at least two actors who affect others in a cycle of receiving input, processing and giving output, and it arouses people’s emotional or mental reactions.

 For our project, others appreciated its focus on hearing and the 3D audio effect, but they also pointed out that it would be a complicated task to make the dark maze and the limited illumination. Whether to move the background has not been decided as well. Based on the feedback, we will move up the time for the start of the project to figure out these big problems first. Besides, the use of Arduino may lack creativity, so we are considering adding signal light or some other parts to strengthen the interaction part. The 3D audio seems like something geek, but it is actually easy to make and we may add more effects to move the sound not only left and right but also forward and backward.  

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Final Project Essay by Shina Chang

Title:

Dancing Digits

Project Statement:

While researching fun and interactive games I found that small and portable is an attractive attribute when it comes to toys and games. For example, the TechDeck was a very popular toy made specifically for the fingers, so taking the concept I want to make a smaller version of popular dancing game Dance Dance Revolution  (DDR) by Konami. This is a full-body engaging game that is great to play alone or with a group of friends. So combining the appeal of a smaller version of a game similar to Dance Dance Revolution will be the optimal type of game to carry around. This game would be advertised towards students who seek a new and unique way to spend their leisure time. 

Project Plan:

The plan for this project is to form the code to respond musically, in other words, there will be a lot of timing between Arduino and processing. Because we are working with music everything must work at the proper times or else it will take away from the playing experience. To start off we will work with the stage and its capacitive sensors and then the code to make sure that they are working properly. and then inserting music will be our next challenge. I hope to have a song choice of at lest 1 or 2 songs but by the user testing date the project will most likely only have one. We will have to laser cut out the stage we plan to use for our mini version of DDR.

The stage will be small enough to be transported around easily while it has enough space for someone to place their hand on it mimicking a person’s legs with their fingers. the stage will consist of four directional arrows one pointing forward, backward, right, and left. The starting position for the user’s fingers will be the center of the stage. The stage will have lights that make the game more visually attractive. 

Context and Significance:

After doing research on projects like TechDeck and DDR I realized I want to incorporate the attractive features of both projects into this project. From TechDecks the idea of creating a finger=friendly version of a skateboard to make it more portable is brilliant and then the whole aspect of an at-home musical entertainment system like DDR is very profound. So to combine these two game attributes into one will create a unique game that is memorable on its own. This game will be similar to DDR in the sense that our project takes into account the hands accessibility. It is difficult to “step back” with fingers propped vertically like human legs, so only the hard version of a song will incorporate the use of the backward pointing arrow. 

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Recitation 9: Final Project Process – Citlaly Weed – Young

  1. Malika – E-MAZE
    1. concept: A game where a player controls a ball with a handle where you are guiding the ball through a maze attempting to color the ground that will light up once the ball passes ontop a tile that serves as the ground. Each level will be designed to your own skill level that is dictated by the time you spend on the level.
    2. suggested improvements: There were two main suggestions. One was that once the ball hit the wall that there be a sound. The second was that there be a trial run so that the player can become familiar and the game does not use the unfamiliarity of the gamers play as their skill for future levels.
    3. my thoughts: I like it because there are many games where they have one single level ready to go, but here you can tell the game what level you are ready for. That feature of the game is the special part of the game.
  2. Caren – Ready, Get set, Guess! 
    1. concept: A game where two players have to guess what/who is in a blurred picture (that will slowly unblur as time goes on) before the time runs out. There will be three buttons that correlate with three multiple choice options on the screen. 
    2. suggested improvements: There were questions on when the game would end and if there would be different levels. I suggested that like the game Kahoot that depending on the time the person would guess that they would receive a certain amount of points. It was also suggested that there be two sets of buttons to better add up who’s point was who’s and also maybe what if there was a split screen.
    3. my thoughts: Again, I like it nothing like testing your recognition skills or maybe revealing how a little too deep you are in the pop culture scene by guessing all those popular memes. Overall sounds very fun to beat the clock and the other player.
  3. Jennifer – Labyrinth
    1. concept: A game where one play plays as Theseus, who is trying to solve/ get out of the labyrinth, and the other who is the Minotaur, who is trying to catch Theseus/ the other player. This game will be controlled by a joystick and on the screen will show a bird’s eye view of the labyrinth. Also, there is a heart rate thing in the beginning where you try to ‘charge’ it in the beginning and depending on how high your heart rate was that is how fast you will be in the game.
    2. suggested improvements: There was a great suggestion that maybe you can see the other player’s trail of where they had been. Also, maybe add a split screen if the trail seeing becomes apart of the game.
    3. my thoughts: I find this one pretty dope. I like the idea of two people up against each other like this battling it out and also getting some greek methodology in. Also, the heart rate thing is cool because you’re telling the software depending on how fast you can get your heart rate how fast you are going to catch/ run away from the player.

Interaction: It seems that between the other group members that have an established concept of what interaction has to be. For example, Jennifer believes that “I define interaction as a breakable cycle in which two or more actors’ outputs build off of and enact direct causation onto each other. One actor’s output is directly a unique result of other’s output”. When we where in the research group project I agreed with this definition. Now though I still agree with that concept; it works fine in my concept of levels of different types of interactions that can not be ordered in a hierarchy, but communicate interaction diffrently. 

My project feedback:

I agree when they felt that my proposal was very stressful. Malika has done this before so she was real with me and said that this would be hard to code and the loading of an iagme would very demanding. They also said that the pop up screen that I wanted to try out might be too confusing while a palyer is tring to play. They suggesed that we should make levels and let is foucus on one issue. Actually that inspired me to keep the same idea, but that once you collect all the bad guys that the end card has a desciptions of each world issue. There was also concern about the vibration sensore, but Olivia mentioned that the only movemnt that the chracter would need is to jump because ‘gravity’ would cause the chracter to fall anyway if the perosn did not jump. Also it was suggested that maybe we could try out a DDR dance pad which I found cool. They were extreamly helpful and I will definatly watch out for any challegenes they warned me about! I will definatly be consider if a DDR dance pad is possible, but who knows. Overall they were very nice to share their wisdom.

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Week 10: Response to Rachel Greene (Shirley Liu)

Before reading Rachel Greene’s “A History of Internet Art”, I did not really understand the term “internet art.” I thought it was something that started very recently, however I learned that it started in 1995 by accident. Internet art is more than just presentation of artwork and interaction with the user, it allows us to see the ideas circulating around during a specific time period. I think it is interesting to see how the different ideas can be presented in various ways by various creators such as artists and technoculture critics. I also found it very interesting that net.artists dove into feminist issues. I found the VNS’ “Cyberfeminist Manifesto” to have some pretty interesting and bold statements. It angered me when I found out that who cared about cyberfeminism were told to take the discussion elsewhere. It also made me wonder how would internet art compare if it had started now and not in the 1990s. Reading Greene’s piece makes me excited about our upcoming internet art project. I am inspired by the many different examples provided in Greene’s article and am thinking of the different roads I can take to approach this project.