—Project proposal for Making things magic

Our idea is essentially a somewhat large raised floor panel with an array of LED pixels as bananas throughout which a ripple of colour appears when a banana is stepped on. When there is no one interacting with it, we hope to have an image of a banana or some amorphous shapes displayed that might change colours or shape over time. This idea stems from the Aurora LED Wall Snap talk, which sparked a set of ideas involving an interactive wall, table, or floor of LEDs. The bananas came about because, why not?

We hope to build a structure strong enough for anyone to interact with, as opposed to strictly small children. It should be interesting from a distance, and inviting as well as responsive to multiple people at once. These banana-pixels would be larger so that we do not have to have such a large number of LEDs and sensors to control. A question we have is whether or not we should have one sensor per banana, or have a sensor per bunch of bananas?

Our first test will so far involve just one of these banana-pixels and a switch, hooked up to the Arduino, to see if having a button switch will be enough just to sense whether it was pressed (ie. stepped on). When pressed, the LED will then simply change colour. We’ll try and build a part of the platform structure for this test to figure out what might be the best way to configure the actuation. The idea is to build up from there, like how we did with our quick banana globe project, as see what works well or better than we thought, or what we’d have to change.