Final Project—Brainstorming!

After receiving our final project prompt to build a puppet, my partner Clara and I set to work with much excitement.  We came out of a wonderful brainstorming session with four possible ideas:

1. Rock Paper Scissors Gloves

This idea was less of a puppet, and more of an interactive game.  It revolved around building and programming gloves using flex sensors.

Idea: Each participant would don a glove and then proceed to play rock paper scissors.  The glove would identify each player’s hand position and transfer it to a display which would lift a rock, paper, or scissors symbol for each player respectively.  The display would also keep score, and celebrate the winner in some way.

2. Battle Bots

Out battle bots idea used the same kind of flex sensor glove as our rock paper scissors idea.

Battle Bot!

Battle participants would each don two flex-sensor gloves and with them, be able to control their robot's movements using their hands.  Each battle bot (pictured above) would have two, independently controlled wheels.  Each glove would control one wheel, and using their gloves the participants would be able to control the direction of rotation of the wheels, as well as have the power to brake them.  We decided that pointing one's index fingers forward would move the wheels forward, sticking one's thumbs up would make the wheels turn backward, and making fists would make the robot to stop.  Using various combinations of these movements, the competitors' challenge would be to maneuver their robot in such a way that it would be able to hit the touch sensor on their rival's robot.  The first player to do so would be the winner!

3. Weather Bot

The purpose of the weather bot was to be a fun, desktop companion.  The user would be able to input the day's temperature (hot/mild/cold) and precipitation (none/rain/snow), and the robot would act and dress appropriately.  The robot would have various accessories to choose from (umbrella, snowboard, beach towel), and via some sort of mechanism (perhaps a magnet) would lift them when necessary.  We decided that our robot would be standing in front of a backdrop that would also have the ability to rotate, as necessary.

My beautiful sketch of potential backdrops

 During our brainstorming session, Lyn told us that it might be possible to hook our robot up to some sort of smart phone so that it could take weather information offline.  This was an exciting feature, and gave our robot the potential to turn from a fun desktop companion to a useful, interactive robot thermometer.

And finally, (drumroll please):

4.  Creep in the Box!

This was actually our very first puppet idea, but I chose to write about it last to make things slightly more suspenseful.  Our idea for the creep in the box was basically to make an interactive (and creepy) jack in the box.  The idea for the creep himself came from SNL’s Lonely Island video “The Creep,” so we knew from the get-go that our puppet would have mustache, slicked-back hair, and shady glasses.  We decided that our creep would have 3 stages, as illustrated in our initial sketch below:

Stage One: When an unsuspecting person comes within 10 feet of our creep, he wolf-whistles to get their attention.

Stage Two:  Interest piqued by the wolf-whistle, unsuspecting person begins to approach mysterious box.  When they come within 5 feet of the box, the top of the creep’s head slowly emerges, and he start peeping out of his box (i.e. creeping).

Stage Three:  If the unsuspecting person hasn’t already been scared away by stage two, they continue to approach the box.  When they reach the box, the creep POPS, jack in the box style, thoroughly surprising the unsuspecting passerby.

We had not come up with any ideas for the physical mechanisms that would make our robot move at this early stage, but we had started to think about how we might be able to use various sensors to trigger each of our three stages.  One idea was to use some sort of hidden touch sensors on the floor that people would trigger as they walked over them.  We also though of possibly using a video camera to sense how far away people were, or of using an ultrasound sensor.

One concern we had at this stage was how our robot would work in crowded areas, since our idea seemed best-suited to be used by one person at a time.

We presented our ideas to the class and got the best feedback on our creep in the box and battle bots ideas, making us excited for the next step in the process..