Designing the Third Interaction and Final Simulation
This week we determined the direction of our third interaction station and loosely designed the final simulation stage.
The third station will be a whistle station, where guests can write and record a playable melody with a variety of instruments (“whistles”). We plan to prototype this interaction using a MIDI keyboard.
In the final simulation stage, guests will be able to visualize their train traveling around a miniature Give Kids The World Village. One of our client’s requests was to provide guests with a better understanding of some of the attractions around the Village; hence the environment will feature attractions from around the Village.
As planned, the gear combination from the first workbench will result in the train model travelling on different paths. To communicate this mechanic, we created the PowerPoint prototype below:
To incorporate the whistle station into the final simulation stage, guests will also be able to press a whistle button to trigger their custom melody. There is a motif at GKTW of various characters sleeping and/or snoring (e.g. Old Elmer, Father Time, Trixie the Triceratops); we plan to have our train’s whistle wake them up.
New Prototypes
On the physical side, we’ve developed simple prototypes for the gear and color stations. These include buttons for the gears, sliders for color selection, and RFID input for both stations.
On the digital side, we have successfully enabled the Unity project to read slider input from the Arduino microcontroller and apply that input on the color combination system. Our next step will be mapping all the physical controls in the Unity game project.
Preparing for Halves
Next week will be our halves presentation – an update to all of the ETC faculty and students on our progress so far this semester, so we ended our week by rehearsing our presentation. We are excited to present all that we’ve accomplished the past six weeks, and we look forward to seeing the work of other project teams so far!