The Virtual MazeSpider 1.0

Vanessa Roa Major Studio 2012

The Virtual Maze

Introduction

Robots; if you got people together, in one room, to try to send the same command to one Robot to commit one action, what would happen? On the surface, one would deduce that The goal of this project was to connect total strangers to work together and make a robot move across an interface.

Inspiration

Precedents

The Subservient Chicken -

A 2004 Burger King Marketing campaign for Burger King's Tender Crisp. The site was created by The Barbarian Group of Boston, Massachusetts, and hosted in Kansas, Missouri. Users could type in over 300 commands and based on the responses the site received, a man in a chicken costume wearing garters on top would perform various tricks for you.

Mock Ups

The first wireframes for my original idea, I moved away from this because the IRC format would have been confusing.

Wireframes

Creating a Maze

Drawing plans for the maze. I made the first sketch on the right before realizing that the layout of the panels wouldn't have been wide enough for the spider to move through.

Rough Sketches

Building a Maze

Various Stages of my maze, as I was building it. I had used some wrapping paper for tracking, but the paper proved to actually be too smooth for the glitter glue I had planned on using for it. I ended up using some tissue paper to lay it down. The tissue paper helped.

Prototypin'

Non-Working Prototype

My website, in the first stages of completion.

Click here to go to my site.

The Website

The Virtual MazeSo, I don't know if the point system would have worked as I envisioned it with a not so clear webcam. The darkness and graininess of the video was probably contributing to the the difficulty I had prototyping the robot from a certain angle, so this is something I would hope to flesh out.

Another point I want to bring up; the point system. This is something I would flesh out a lot more and make more clear. I felt like the x marks may not have been clear enough on the map, so that's another point I would revisit. I also wanted to steer this project in a direction that would work for a specific audience. This wasn't something I thought about when I first brainstormed the project and I think the ambiguous result lent itself to that.

I didn't get as far as utilizing the Arduino Protoshield, although I bought it. It's something I would love to play around with in the future.

After Thoughts

For watching! Thanks

Vanessa Roa Major Studio 2012