Week 4

Our main focus for this week has been preparing demos for our Quarters walk-arounds. While we haven’t had the time or resources for any significant physical builds or fabrication just yet, we do have a number of prototypes we plan to show off.

We have a WiFi module that we have set up to essentially work as a proximity sensor. We plan to develop a group-based game around this capability.

We also have a virtual build running for a standard gridded game board that can be influenced by various forms of data. Currently, we have it running a game of checkers. This is the first step towards realizing our dynamic, physical board game concept.

We now have a robotic arm that we have assembled. We’ve been working to rig it with an Arduino as the controller instead. Eventually, we want to have multiple users across the Internet controlling different joints/components in the arm to work towards a common goal.

Finally, we also have our own talking digital assistant. It uses speech recognition to feed requests into a number of different internet-based APIs, including Cleverbot for general conversations, Wolfram|Alpha for information requests, and YouTube to play music. Eventually, we would like to give this assistant an engaging 3D-printed robotic shell, complete with lights, servos, and a bit of personality. For now, we are making do with a rough paper stand-in, so at least we have a character to direct conversations to rather than just a bare circuit board and microphone.

Next week will be all about prepping for Quarters and choosing our next steps based on the feedback we received.