In week 7 of the course we had a mini workshop in visual programming. I was curious about Processing and the possibilities in combining physical interfaces with on-screen visuals.

When I was young I loved the game Battle painters. It allows you and your friends to play against each other on the same keyboard of only one computer. Each player moves a paint-brush cursor in their own color across a canvas – the object is to paint as much as possible in a set time. The player with the highest percentage painted wins. It’s pretty awesome, check it out:

So I thaught about differnet ways to controle a cursor. I considered four push-buttons  to recreate a D-Pad (Steuerkreuz) or a Joystick. I also considered things like touck sensors or bend sensors. I decided to try something new by using two potis per player, one for left/right, one for up/down.

When the potis are turned, their resistance changes. With a second resistor this forms a voltage devider. The varying inputs are then read via analogRead and printed via Serial.print. The serial communication is then read out by Processing and the values are mapped to a position.

The prototype proved the interface to actually be quite hard to controle.

If I was to continue with this project. I would experiment with different kinds of input interfaces. Also the code was fairly bare up this point. Some extras would be great, like for example a time counter and a function that can read out the colors percentages and tell who won the match.