Viewing work: VOID

To create whatever we wanted from the technical building blocks we were allocated (my groups' was RFID)

2008

3 weeks

I was the main programmer on this project (surprisingly) and did almost all of the Action Script 3 coding thanks to help from friends at Hyper Island.

This project was made as a school assignment during the “Experience technology” module of my first year at Hyper Island. Each group of five were allocated different pieces of technology including Arduino and RFID kits. My group got the RFID kit with tags and reader. The first week was spent on brainstorming what we wanted to do and also develop a concept around it. We also did some reading up on the use of RFID technology and researched what was (and wasn’t) possible to do with it.

We came up with a “Simon says”-based memory game that we called VOID (with the tag line “Fill the void”). The idea was that you got a series of letter combinations on the screen and you had to remember and match these to make it to the next level. The levels got harder with more and more letters as the game went on.

We quickly divided our group into two sub divisions; one focusing on the software side of it with coding as main priority and the other on the look and feeling of it all. They built a wooden box that would act as the controller of the game. The box was also used to house the cables and computer that controlled the whole thing. Beautiful V, O, I and D wooden letters were produced (thanks to John and his father) which were then smoothed out and got covered with varnishing. We hooked them up with RFID tags and glued cloth underneath to make them slide on the plexi glass surface of the box (and also to cover up the RFID tag from view). This way we could identify which letter was currently active on the “drop zone” (featuring the RFID reader).

We presented our project at the Experience Technology ‘08 exhibition up in Stockholm with great success. Many tried to fill the void and many failed (I’m not counting the guys who were so desperate that they wrote down all the combinations during the day to finally beat the game just before closing time at the last day of exhibition).