Joel Tan on DECO2300: Interactive Prototype III Concept Idea/Experiment/Plan B.

For this prototype, I have decided to make a feature addition into my current prototype. The plan for interactive prototype III is to implement the beer pong technique game into the current game mash up of tic-tac-toe and minesweeper. The reason why this idea came up was to make the game more of a skill based and strategy as well instead of a chance/luck game. Naturally with this idea, the game will also last longer as it is harder to place a mark now rather than just choosing tiles in the previous prototypes.

The idea:

figure on the Left: 16 cups; figure on the right: one cup with three wires
*Three wires are horizontal, vertical wire and ground wire.

There will be 16 cups in fixed positions and each of them with similar set up to the figure on the right. Players will now get to use a ball (either a ping pong ball or rubber or squash ball) and bounce it over from an acceptable distance towards the 16 cups. Logically, if the ball lands on either one of the cup, the player's mark will appear in the game.

Set Up Experiment/Trial Run:

To set this up for a trial run, I aligned the three wires in such a way that when the ball lands into the cup, the ball will make contact with all three wires and make the connection.

How i set up the wires for this trial run. 2 vertical and one horizontal beneath it to hold the ball together in place.
(click image to enlarge)

Ping pong ball with water used and tested.
(click image to enlarge)

Experiment Discovery
1. A ping pong ball doesn't work even if it is dipped into the water before it being bounced into the cup. This is because when it is bounced, the water that is around the ball will not make a good connection and hence, resulting a high chance of no connection being made.

2. A ball of plasticine (playdoh) works. From the .gif file on the left, I used a red playdoh to test out the connection of three wires in the cup and it worked perfectly fine. The only problem was that a playdoh obviously cannot bounce and the game idea could not work with a playdoh.

Plan B:

From the figure above, I've added water to this same game concept. So this time, when the ball bounces into the cup, the 'grounded' water will be displaced and will touch the vertical and horizontal wire which will make the connection. I've decided to use a squash ball instead of ping pong balls as they have similar sizes to the ping pong ball but have more weight on it, making it easier to displace water in the cup. So yeap, i will have 16 cups of this which will correspond to each tile in the game!! (:

Progress- Setting up:

The .gif below shows a trial run i did to make sure this technique will work. This trial was done before setting up all the 16 cups in place. From the .gif below, it is seen that when the ball enters the cup, it displaces the water, making a connection; landing a mark in the game.

I used 'Mighty Tac' glue to put together the cups and a solid cardboard as a base. The reason why the cups need to be glued was because the cups could fall over when the ball is being tossed at it, which is something we all dont want to happen.

Picture below shows the overall set up of the 4x4 grid 16 cups glue to the cardboard.

The COMPLETE Setup:

Picture below shows the complete set up of my new physical prototype.

Keys A, S, D and F mapped onto my surface pro trough MakeyMakey.

Two ground wires are put onto the cardboard which are then branched out into many wires that connects to all the 16 cups. Ground wires are always touching the water which makes the water itself grounded (earth).