Mike McCracken

This release from CultureMob.com is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. In addition to expanding from Seattle into Denver and Portland with it’s event-finding magics (with, of course, the world to follow), this release includes the fruits of my labors: editability!

We’ve released this with an experimental ability for anyone with an account to make edits to the data. This should make my wife Keely very happy, since the poor categorizations of dance performances have bugged her.

I recently put together a fun little project using an arduino, headphones and an accellerometer.

When you put on the headphones, you hear a sound that is cycling through a sequence indicating its approach. The sound is somewhere on the left-right axis in the headphones. If the sound is to your left, you have to tilt your head to the left until the sound is centered. If you tilt your head (the paddle) to the right position in time, you hit the ball an continue, the ball’s approach speeding up each time. If you fail to hit the ball a buzzer and light go off to punish you and the game is over.

I am interested in using senses differently and getting people to focus on their senses in novel, interesting and engaging ways.

My first implementation is very rudimentary. My sound generation capabilities are limited to square waves at full volume so there isn’t true panning - just left, right and centered. In addition to real panning, I would like volume control to indicate the ball’s approach rather than the tone sequence I have now. I need to figure out what kind of RC circuit would smooth the PWM output to act like volume control, or use a digital potentiometer.

I also hope to build a transceiver into the game so that it can be multiplayer. Potentially there could be a number of players and it would be like audio hackey sack.

Another thought for extension is to use the other axis on the accelerometer so that one could use forward and backward motion in competitive play. A violent motion forward ’spikes’ the ball at the other player - just like in real ping pong.

I used the Protoshield, which is a handy way to consolidate a small arduino project.

This project was inspired by an exhibit at Disneyland The Exploratorium.