1. Why do we build
In the beginning of this semester (fall 2006), My friend Tommy initiated the idea of Rock- Scissors-Paper game. At that time, he wanted to build a machine, which can interact with human gestures in a way of simple common game. So we started to try different approach to create a device that can play R.S.P.(Rock Scissors Paper) with xx interaction.
2. Idea sources
One thing we were thinking about the traditional game is that, every game has a winner, loser, or end up with a tight game. Most of the time, Rock- Scissors-Paper is not really a game for having fun, but a tool to decide who has a privilege upon the other (just like flip the coin to decide which football team offend first). How can we enhance the joy within a common Rock- Scissors-Paper game? Now that we learn the powerful visual language environment -Processing, we can reward the winner in a very different way. For example, xx . In this case, we try to do animation in the whole process of playing Rock- Scissors-Paper, to guide the players to see a different world of possibility of Rock- Scissors-Paper.
Talking about animation, we think about comic as a funny and efficient way to demonstrate who wins the game. For our own taste, Tommy and I tend to grab the pictures we need from a Japanese comic book called “JoJo Amazing Adventure”, original by Haruki xx. We edit and cut out some pictures from the original comic, which are talking about Rock- Scissors-Paper game, and use them as animation sources.
The other thing is that sometimes people tend to win a game by cheating. In certain situation, those who don’t care about their reputation insidiously won the game by changing his gesture right after they saw opponent’s gesture. So how do we prevent the honest people from frustrated by those cunning bad guy? After a brainstorming, the idea come up to our mind: we hide both player’s hands in a box, so that they cannot see each other’s gesture, and the only way to know each other’s gesture is the winning or losing moment which is illustrated on a screen. By this way,
3. How to play
So here is the playing process:
1. Players wear the playing glove in one hand
2. Animation shows the introduction picture
3. Both players put their one hand in the boxes
4. Readers read their gesture and send it to computer
5. Animation shows player’s gestures
6. Animation shows who wins the game
4. Make the secret black box
How did we build this kind of game machine? Here is the process:
1. Make a pair of conductive glove with wire
2. Connect the wire on the glove onto the microcontroller (Arduino board)
3. Build boxes
4. Hook up the microcontroller with laptop
How do we detect the hand movement? Or a static gesture of our hand? The first thing come to our mind is flex sensor. Flex sensor is a long thin plastic that can generate different resistant from the angle you bend it, and send the value as signal to your microcontroller (for working mechanism, please go to http://www.imagesco.com/sensors/flex-sensor.html ) Unfortunately, we found out the value sent by flex sensors is not that easy to use and map to the hand gestures. Instead of receive analog value, we try the opposite way: digital read.
Based on the digital read idea, we use several naked wires, and sew them on certain position of a pair of glove, to make circuit initiate on the glove. While player doing Paper gesture, his five finger are spread out and no one touch any others, so that there is “no” circuit generated. And While he’s doing Scissors, his ring finger and little finger come really close to each other, so that contact each other where we sew the wire on, to generate “one” conductive circuit. As you probably can imagine, if a player is doing stone, not only his ring finger and little finger close, but also his index finger and middle finger touch each other, and that’s the other place we have sew on, and so there will be “two” circuits happen.
In other words, the number of circuit happening and the gestures are mapping like this:
Gesture Circuit
Rock 2
Scissors 1
Paper 0
Once the microcontroller receive the digital input (how many circuit occur), it will send the serial value for Processing to read, and Processing will generate different animation determined by the serial value.
5. Let’s play it!
The machine successfully read the gesture and displays the animation (special thanks to Tom Igoe and Daniel Shiffman). The next step is about using this kind of device to play different games with different gesture, such as Thumb-Wrestling, and Hand-Clapping. It might take us to change the device a little bit, such as the size of the box, the sewing on different places for different gestures, etc. It seems like Rock-Scissors-Paper is the only universal game in the world, and now we’ve already built a universal game machine, which hopefully will someday be a best seller in the game industry. So, let’s play it!!
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