Waiting Room Puzzles

I’ve been thinking about alternative ideas for this project, although I’m not sure how much time to spend thinking about ideas that I may not do, so I’ll see what sort of comments I get from this.

Anyway, as anyone who’s ever been to a dentist, doctors or anywhere with a waiting room knows, you will usually be sitting in a rather dull room with a few chairs for generally ill, sad or scared looking people and a small coffee table featuring celebrity related magazines from 2002.  BORING! Even for an adult, let alone anyone who has bought their children along to sit on their laps crying their eyes out or running around a 3×3 metre room screaming and shouting giving everyone else a headache.

What if there was a focal point?  Something that might keep the average child amused for a few minutes and maybe even spur a little interest from the odd adult too.  Instead of a coffee table full of outdated magazines, what if there was a table top game, operated using touch screen technology.  Or perhaps an entire wall feature – a projection of a game on the wall that users can interact with directly.

What is this game?  ‘The aim of the game is to figure out how to play the game’.  There will be no interface as such.  Users will interact with various objects and shapes in varying colours to complete each section of the game, which will consist of a number of different screens that the user will progress through as they play.  Each screen is essentially a different ‘Puzzle’ or a variation of a previous puzzle; in a finale product the number of screens/puzzles could be endless, although bare in mind that this will just be a prototype, but this would allow the game to be running all day without being restarted from the beginning as new patients enter the waiting room and investigate the game.

Example of puzzles in the game could be:-

• move a coloured ball or object from A to B, but to do so the user would have to work out a path through a maze; the path can be changed by switching positions of movable walls within the maze.
• Match objects of the same shape and colour from a selection.
• Work out what shapes fit together to create another larger given shape.
• Etc.

Here are some videos: -

Tabletop touch screen game, with voice recognition, although I seriously think a game like this will still be easier just using a mouse and the voice recognition is nothing new, you can use MS Gamevoice software to shout commands into your games which replicate the keyboard shortcuts, anyway it’s the table top function that’s important here:-

 

Super large touch screen interactive game: -

 
Projected touch screen: -

 
I thought this video might get your juices flowing: -

 
10 metre long touch sensitive bar – not relevant to what I’m doing and I don’t really see what uses it has in real life but interesting nonetheless… I wonder what happens if you spill your beer on it: -

The reactable

Not convinced this would work for kids as the image suggests here but nonetheless a good reference for Lisa’s project idea.

The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

Note the use of building type blocks, very good idea to use something kids know already and physical to trigger whats happening on screen. Below is a video showing work developing purely that idea.