First day of prototyping

The group quickly found together because we had worked together the week before when looking at phidgets for the first time (David joined) We started out brainstorming on all ideas we had (possible and impossible).

Different ideas
The first round of brainstorm resulted in these ideas:

Color Table
A table that changes color depending on what you put on it or how long it’s been there. This could be realized with either temperature censor (a hot cop of coffee vs. a cold glass of milk) or RFID tags and different LED lights. A variation of this could be a floor with different lighting, like in Michael Jackson – Billie Jean music video

Automatic typewriter
Another idea was an automatic typewriter that could do ASCII-Art or print something from a computer. That would mean that all keys should be connected to different motors which would mean a lot of motors so that idea was quickly dropped.

Ball game
A third idea was a sort of game where 2 players had a ball each. These two would then be connected to each other (by Bluetooth or similar) and then be pressing different places on the ball the two players could then play some sort of game.

None of the ideas seemed to be the perfect one for the group, either it was to big a project for at prototype or only a minority of the group liked the idea. It seemed that because we hadn’t any constraints it’s was actually hard to find ideas. Therefore we try to agree on some things that we all wanted the prototype to have and thereby setting some constraints for us self.

Constraints
We agreed that (even though it could be fun) a toy for kids would be overkill because they have there imagination (and we only have the reality… ) and maybe wouldn’t need all kinds of electronic. It could on the other hand be great to make a game for grown ups. Another thing we all agreed on was that the prototype either should be some sort of furniture or something you would be able to take with you, thus not an installation. We all wanted something with interaction (Mia was pretty keen on getting something with motors) and light or sound. A common interest was also to control something in an alternative way. For example had Christoffer seen a harp made of water beams that you could play on.

Brainstorm (again)
We tried brainstorming again which resulted in different variations of the ball game but also an idea of taking an punch bag and making it play a sound each time you hit it (like "Auch") or maybe making a game of it so you had to hit in the right combination. This idea changed so you could use the punch bag to play music on (drums for example). The alternative way of playing drums combined with the water harp ended up in the idea of playing drums in the air with help of either proximity censors or sonar censors. We all liked the idea of playing something without actually seeing what made the music play. We named the prototype "BeatBox". The "Beat" in BeatBox is both from beating the punch bag (where the idea derived from) and a drum beat.

The proto-prototype
After that Mia, Josefin, David and I tested the idea, but because we didn't have a proximity censor we used a light censor instead. We placed this in a cup to avoid to much light from the sides. Pretty fast we got it working and it seemed it could be possible to make a working prototype with the time we had available. Only problem was that due to the amount of events the light censor produced every time you moved your hand, the computer couldn't keep of with playing the same amount of sounds. David started working on a solution to that problem, and the rest of us went home.