…and did i have fun? sheesh!
photo credit: jon @ contains art
…and did i have fun? sheesh!
photo credit: jon @ contains art
the brief was computer game. so, let’s make this thing an immersive experience. you enter the container, the ‘press play to start’ message is flashing, music booming…
with a micro:bit – and it’s radio-link to the track and car – connected to a laptop, a quick bit of patching i’d done the day before got some videos and coundown sounds playing in response to the “wait, 3, 2, 1, start, finish, wait” coming down the USB cable. add projector and PA, and boom!
we’d done it. ten teenagers, ten hours. quite the achievement, and time enough to play with it!
so how does it look? and how does it look with a computer-driving-game first-person-view!? could you stream that camera feed to a phone hanging in front of someone’s eyes?
now i know that wifi streaming from a go-pro isn’t going have the low-latency required for actually driving it, but that’s just a spur to research what might… fpv racing drones seems to have this solved.
bonus: this photo was taken by one of the teenagers. it’s a great one.
track hacked, onto task three: the car.
with micro:bit in there, parasitising it’s power off two of the three car batteries, we could disable the motor until the go! of the countdown, have different team logos lit up on the roof, send accellerometer data back to a computer to make futuristic driving sounds… or, most simply, give us a button to start the countdown. feels right having it on the car.
with the limited time, this is actually one i made earlier; the removable roof and fit of the micro:bit was a bit of a gift. within the workshop, we experimented with fitting cameras to the back-up car…
diary | 19 jan 2019 | tagged: cardboard wipeout · contains art · teaching · embedded
lights programmed with a countdown and chase animation i’d made the day before, onto the next task: fit them round the track.
diary | 19 jan 2019 | tagged: cardboard wipeout · contains art · teaching · embedded
with the track made, time to add the digital magic and make it a game.
first up: LED strips with an extra wire… a programmable wire. and here is a micro:bit, essentially the guts of a phone made so we can control and play with things. with a bit of drag-and-drop in a web browser, we can make patterns down the strip and animate them.
but we need two strips, with a controller each, to go round our track. so how to animate them together? the micro:bit has radio, they can talk to each other and say “now!”. this is also how we’re going to make the whole game work, with more of these boards talking to each other.
photo credit: jon @ contains art
diary | 19 jan 2019 | tagged: cardboard wipeout · contains art · teaching · embedded
to watchet, for the first of my two workshops getting teenagers to do creative-tech stuff. twee for me, but west somerset has the lowest social mobility in the whole of the UK and watchet is the most deprived ward in the district. so kinda serious.
the brief was gaming, and one idea led to wipeout-with-cardboard. one shipping container, two dirt-cheap radio-controlled cars and a village’s worth of post-christmas cardboard later, we had a track. admittedly more cardboard than tech at the moment, but this route is surely more engaging than coding 101.
aaaand… wipeout? i challenge anyone to find a better cultural artefact from 1996 than the opening sequence of wipeout 2097: the designers republic, future sound of london, it’s a coming together of all the arts.