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.


TEAM

Sijie Yang

DELIVERABLES

Design document

PROJECT CATEGORY

User research
Interaction design
Advance prototyping

METHODS

Ethnographic
Usability evaluation
Experience prototyping

TOOLS

Arduino tool kit
Sketching
Photoshop
Indesign

@ 2014, Vamsi Chaitanya. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.