Body Electric Final Project: DarkMaze

This past week Wangshu, Mathura, Christina, and I presented our final project for Body Electric, the fully realized DarkMaze.

We had gotten the virtual DarkMaze to work pretty well a few weeks ago, so the time since then we’ve spent working on fabricating a physical maze. We decided to hack a cheap, readymade tilt maze instead of making our own, which saved us a lot of time and trouble. At first we attempt to cut out the maze bottom and then just the walls, hoping to replace it with our own lasercut ones.

This turned out to be too difficult with the cheap and fragile material the maze is made out of, and dissembling it was out of the question. The tilting action is afforded by two strings in tension under the board, something that we wouldn’t have been able to replace after sticking our maze in there. So we decided instead to build our maze on top of the preexisting one.

I laser cut some cardboard for the maze floor and spraypainted it black to give it contrast with the walls, which Christina laser cut from white poster board. Mathura cut some wooden circles and mounted the servo horns to them, then glued them to the tilt knobs. We affixed the servos with wooden standoffs and also created a frame to sit on top of the maze, which would house the white LEDs and one-way mirror acrylic top.

Testing the servos

Mathura and I created a circuit for eight, bright white LEDs and hot glued it to the inside of the frame for the acrylic. Laser cutting the acrylic actually took a super long time – the frame is not shaped regularly, nor are the little slats we created to hold the acrylic. But we finally got there.

With everything pretty much ready to go, we tested the maze navigation just with the eye blinks and head tilts, not yet accounting for the focus brainwaves. The “focus” mental state we defined as high alpha and low beta waves, based on tests that we did (one in which I focused on a banana, another in which I read a passage from a book). Wangshu has a good description of it here.

Yes! It worked! Now it was time to put it all together, with the focus brainwaves turning on the LEDs that revealed the maze behind the one-way mirror.

Success! This was so exciting. We only had two little fixes to make to make DarkMaze work perfectly. Mathura switched the head tilt actions so that tilting forward made the ball move away from you, and tilting back made it move toward you. This felt more natural as an action in gameplay. I also widened the goal hole and outlined it in white so that the user could see it more easily and so the ball would fall through instead of teetering on the edge. The beauty of the way we designed the maze is that the user can easily swap it out for mazes of different difficulty levels, allowing for true brain training.

We’re working on a nice final video of the DarkMaze in play, so stay tuned. We also plan to show our project at ITP’s Spring Show, so we’ll be spending some time finessing the DarkMaze and making it look more sleek. In the meantime, check out this shot of our Ultracortex, complete with comfort nodes!