TUI Midterm Project Proposal
Team Members: Forrest, Rita, Sam, Yuetian
Areas of Interest: For the midterm project, we are interested in using a highly tactile medium — LEGO blocks — to facilitate digital sharing and collaboration.
On the input side, LEGO bricks allow for creativity and exploration while still adhering to the constraints imposed by the standardized sizing and limited menu of colors. As a result, we plan to experiment with different ways of sensing / recording building with LEGOs. This is a non-trivial problem, and so we hope that we can creatively find ways to capture the state of a physical system that minimize cost / burden while maximizing control and expression for the user.
On the output side, for this project, we hope to explore ways in which a digital representation of a LEGO construction can be shared for collaborative play. This could include a shared digital space to interact in, an AR mode that makes an object “visible” in your real-world environment, or something else TBD. One potential idea could be to allow the user to select a theme as input, like outer space or underwater in the ocean. As the user builds, the output would use the selected theme to create a digital representation based on the type of LEGO block and placement. The LEGO idea was inspired by the difficulties for children to have access to collaborative play with friends and other children during Covid where safety and social distancing impacted play. Users could save digital representations and share their creations with others in addition to interacting with others in real time. Also, this game can also become a communication tool. Kids can find friends from any other countries to play it together.
If we choose to expand on these ideas for the final project, we can consider ways in which this input could be used as a teaching tool (to manipulate, for example, a simulation of hydrology or urban planning), and ways that tactile input with LEGOs could correspond to actuated physical output either locally or remotely.
