Author: Kyle Li

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TreesNYC is designed to suggest game mechanics for a casual game with content from New York City’s vast database on its sidewalk trees. In the prototype a single player is cast in the role of a Parks Department employee during a day on the job caring for the trees on one city block. The object of the game is to achieve a high score by completing horticultural tasks and, by end of game, to learn about and address all of the locale’s arboreal needs. Tasks include watering, feeding, trimming, and planting. The player must choose and operate necessary tools on the main avatar, a Parks Department tree maintenance truck. The goal is to bring trees into the forefront of the conception of urban spaces, with some additional understanding of the forces that can support or stress urban ecosystems. Our collaborator was an instructor from The New School architecture faculty. The next iteration will more fully embody a curriculum for middle school based on the ecology of trees in The City of New York.

Nana, my MFADT thesis, is a non-player game built with a modified video game console and a repurposed game controller. The project reduces the role of human players to mere spectators and explores the interplay between machines. Nana, the name of the little robot, is a curious video game controller with a mobile sub-unit. She rolls on a flat LCD screen and communicates the information she found on the colorful screen to the game console (The Mother). The Mother reads the information and turns them into various direct and indirect outputs, mostly in the forms of sound and visual. Once a while, when the information sequence is matching certain condition that is agreed between Mother and Nana, Mother will turn the screen off. Nana will then take a rest, and a random bedtime story about Nana will be narrated by Mother before everything goes back to normal.

I didn’t come to DT to be a creative technologist, but like most of my peers, I was seeking a change in my design career. After I took all the necessary steps and figured out how to built a Simon Says electronic game in the physical computing (pcomp) class, it was clear that interactive electronics is the change I was looking for. That being said, I started late, I didn’t dive into the world of physical computing right in the beginning, so when I entered my thesis year, I was still taking pcomp themed courses. Every Time I am introduced to a new possibility, I will change a part of my thesis if not all of it, that drives my thesis teacher nuts. I tried to catch up and get ahead. Eventually, I landed on the idea of Mother and Nana, an expandable and interconnected system that can grow with my newly gained knowledge.

I created a circuit to read the voltage sent to the vibration motors in the game controller. The strength of the voltage is controlled by API in XNA. Therefore, I can create my own protocol to map the strength of the voltage to a set of commands in my microcontroller (BS2). For input to the XNA, I use the analogue stick(s), it is made of two potentiometers with about 10K resistance each. In XNA, the resistance will be mapped to a number between -1 and 1.

I had a lot of fun hacking Xbox 360 controllers, especially making the slave mobile sub-unit. It is made of two modules, a motor module and secondary communication module (SCM). The motor module came straight from an old toy of mine, it has two sets of geared motors well intergraded together in a metal structure. SCM is slightly complicated. It is made of an Atari 2600 cartridge PCB, a BASIC Stamp 2 (BS2), a motor driver, and a set of two optoisolators. When I designed this chassis I decided to look back to early video game hardware for inspirations. I have been using the Atari 2600 cartridge PCB for some of my BS2 projects in the past. The PCB has exactly the same number of pins as a BS2 chip. I usually mount my BS2 on a PCB, and use it with a regular Atari 2600 connector, it looks really nice on top of a robot.

https://makezine.com/2008/05/30/parsons-design-technology-1/

Experiment on alternative haptic technology. This balloon popper is driven by a modified Player 2 XBOX 360 controller, one of the vibration motors of which was replaced with an air pump. In this specific experiment, the pump responses to the player 1’s movement!

::first vital sign

PONG VEST is a game vest that transforms a social phenomenon into a fun and awkward experience right where it happens.

Does it really matter where you play the game? Will the context enhances, or subverts the game experience? It is going to be a mixture of all. My vital sign for this first assignment is human gesture and the particular one I am looking into is men’s most mysterious phenomenon-”nipple grabbing.” In my participant observation, grabbing each other’s nipples is an interesting activity among men. They are sensitive; they are weak; They are the best targets for a friendly attack. It is usually the last minute enhancement to a joyful picture of close friendship. We’ve seen this happened countless time among us so now it is time to spicy it up! PONG is hands down the best solution to this project. Despite the fact that PONG is the best example for a paddle controller game, this historical landmark symbolizes the beginning of our body as a playground.

::precedents:

Instead of detecting a vital sign and have the wearable react to it passively I want the wearable to take over the initiation and then trigger the vital sign. Jennifer’s Intimate Controller will not become an intimate wearable until the interaction begins when the players touch the predesignated buttons in their underwear. (This reverse process also applies to most of the sensorless LED garments.)

A. Game controller and underwear- Jennifer Chowdhry and her Intimate Controllers

Jennifer Chowdhury, the mind behind what is either the stupidest or the greatest idea of all time, started by making a bra into a paddle controller. Touching the left breast made the paddle go left, and touching the right one made it go right. Building off of that, she came up with the controllers that has six different sensors in it, and for the fellas there’s a set of boxer shorts with another six sensors.

B. massage-me

Massage-me is a wearable massage interface that turns a video game player’s excess energy into a back massage for an innocent bystander.

C. Joseph Beuys

D. Lee Bontecou

E.Issey Miyake

C.D.E. Design wise, I look into works by Joesph Beuys, Lee Bontecou, and Issey Miyake. I want to bring out the awareness of a piece of cloth and the three dimensional aspect of it.

::methodology

>sketch out

click to enlarge

>testing the circuit on a breadboard

>solder them to a board and rearrange to make the circuit smaller

>hide the LCD serial output under the Stamp socket to save some space.

>mono phone jack as control input for easy detachment

>add serial port ( the four pin thingy ) for easy update

>screen testing

>the paddle controller is complete! (still need some skins)
>start sewing lately. I only know one way to sew and Alison taught me how to close it. I am covering the technology with fabric and will eventually move to bigger piece.
>it is done!