Demo video on how interactive dice works.
In this project, we aimed at a marginalized group
of people whose eyesights are too defective to see
details on even very close objects. The intention of
our design is enabling those people to play a dice
in a conventional as well as familiar way, but “feel”
the numbers intuitively on each side of it through
interactive technology, which is Arduino platform
in our case. With this idea in mind, we finally made
an interactive fuzzy dice by using one Arduino
board, one RobotGeek sensor shield, one buzzer,
six tilt sensors and several wires. The prototype
has been programmed to play six distinguishable
sound patterns that represent figures from 1 to 6
respectively.Thus people who are not able to see it can
easily tell which number is facing up by hearing
and comprehending meaningful sound patterns.
Intended User Group
Our intended user group consists of people who
are not able to see the numbers on the dice while
they are playing with the it, including the blind
population, people whose eyes are covered for
gaming reasons, and users who play in the low
light environments or even in darkness. We thought there was an
opportunity that we can modify the dice and make
it equipped with unintended interactive capacities
in order to fulfill marginalized needs that have been
ignored by the public.
Goals for the Experience
Like we mentioned above, we want to enable
people who are lack of visual sense to play a dice
like how normal people do, and to be capable of differentiating figures from 1 to 6 accurately, easily
and intuitively. Our way of achieving this goal is to
embed a lightweight and programmable sound
making system into an ordinary dice.
Prototyping
Assembling Arduino board with Robotgeek sensor shield. A
piece of paper was folded and inserted in between the USB port and the shield to avoid short circuit.
Testing on the tilt sensor to see if it can work properly by
using a LED light to provide visual feedback as confirmation.
Running tests on the situations that either three tilt senors or
six sensors were combined and working together.
Cutting the fuzzy toy dice and taking out its foam body. Only
one side of the dice was left open so that we can put everything back into it again afterwards.
Nexy, placing all the sensors on the surface of the foam body by
using rubber bands. Each sensor was facing the side with a specific number they were representing.
We placed the board and the shield into the groove we cut, we
were installing all the sensors and color coding each wire.
Fixing all the tilt sensors and wires around the surface of the
foam cube by applying scotch tape. It allowed us to alter the arrangement without irrevocable settlement.
Last step is to place the integrated interactive system was into the red dice cover. One small hole was cut on the side with figure 3 in order to plug in USB power port.