Throw the ball into our tilt-maze to generate a video!

F2005 Term Project

Based on the simple children’s toy, our 1.5m tall tilt maze allows viewers to interact with our video by throwing a ball into its top.

The maze must be jostled to force the ball down various levels of holes, triggering a switch at each hole.

Each hole triggers a separate video clip and, thus, generates a personalized movie.

The arrangement of the holes is a permutation (ala William Burroughs) of the 4-letter word “LOVE” as there are 4 holes to a each of the 7 levels. The holes were mapped to a keyboard controller to generate ASCII into a flash program running the interface and videos. The video consists of branching events through one day in the life of a student soap opera and the entire process is an exercise in non-linear storytelling.

Various designs were tested in 3D Studio Max using the physics modeling system Reactor. The interface had to be both easy and fun to use. Each level is a flat plane in order for there to be a chance where the ball can get “stuck” in one of the corners. This acts as a forcing function for the user must interact with the “art object” in order to finish their video.

A motion-controlled spotlight illuminated the column from above and was timed to turn off once the video began playing.

We noticed that many users at the Fall exhibition did not realize they were supposed to touch it. Once they saw the video title clip featuring a visual explanation, they were all too happy to throw the ball in and push it around.

Group: Ivan (Serbia), Pongpan (Thailand), and danomatika (US)

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Here is the flash program used to control the videos

Instructions:

• Use the keys ‘l’ ‘o’ ‘v’ ‘e’ to generate a video.
• The program takes strings of 7 characters and a video is assembled based on this string
• The video is played when the ‘enter’ key is pressed
• If you press ‘enter’ before finishing the string, the remaining characters will be randomly chosen. This is a safety in case one of the switches broke on the interface.

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Here’s music Pongpan and I made for the event

• intro
• song1
• song2
• song3
• song4

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Pictures of the interface