Our Final Video - Sonic Slime by Team Eagle
by Ricky Yean
Team Eagle // CS247 Team Eagle: Shrestha Chowdhury, Nathan Marrocco, Roseann Cima, Ricky Yean. Coach: Luke Woods.
Project Name: Sonic Slime
Project Goal: Through Sonic Slime, we hope to bring children’s love for tactile interactions to life, encouraging them to use their sense of touch, and letting them hear otherwise invisible electrical connections by creating and playing with play-doh.
Here are some pictures from final presentation day. We were so excited and so happy to see that the kids LOVED it.
Taking the feedback from the last user test, we decided to redefine who we are making the toy for. We decided to change Silly Slime Symphony into Sonic Slime, create an alien landscape environment with sound effects that fit the landscape. We also came up with a no-glove solution to our second toy, and we were eager to go back to Seth with what we got. He loved it, but we walked away understanding a few more things, such as how the exposed wire could be perceived as dangerous by the parents, even though we had made sure that the currents came from 2 double-A batteries so that they wouldn't reach a dangerous threshold. We had to think of a way to work that in. The wires that were attached to the second toy were also too rigid, making it hard for Seth to just pick them up and smash them together because then the wires would come off. We needed a solution to that as well.
We went out right after we figured out that we needed to keep water down a straight line in order to produce the kind of variations in sound that we wanted. We put the play doh on a tray and tilted it so that the water stays at the bottom of the tray, and then we asked the kids to play with it. We thought it was so cool that it was working, but they weren't too enthusiastic. We also noticed that the metal benches we were testing on was conducting and ruining the nice little variations we wanted he kids to notice. This user test was also the first time we had tested with girls, and we noticed that they weren't too curious about our toy. Our alien sounds weren't too engaging and got suggestions from them to do something with bird sounds. It also didn't look too good on a tray and we learned the importance of having an environment where playing with sound-enabled play-doh makes more sense.
As we are getting further along with the play-doh idea, having figured out a couple ways we can produce sound from it, we wanted to go back and make a few more observations with how kids play with play-doh. We went to a 4 year-old named Seth and got him to show us how he plays with play-doh. We also made silly putty and brought it to him.
Seth role-plays IronChef a lot with the play-doh. When cutting the food he'd sometimes make sound effects. Also makes toys out of the play-doh to play with: bowling balls, frisbees, etc. Identities of objects are super plastic. And he likes the way it feels when he hits it against his head. And he likes mashing it up.
He loved the silly putty. It was more slime in his hands than putty. It was a mess, but it was awesome. The putty itself isn't particularly good for building/sculpting. But the drizzles on the table were really cool and the blob moved/oozed after seth had touched it. Maybe if we caught the two dimensional image of the putty on a screen or something, and then sonified that, it'd be cool. With color-coding. Kind of a cheap way to integrate something tactiley interesting into a product, (it'd be like a scanner?).
We captured some videos, but posterous isn't very good at converting them and embedding them, so the link to see them is below: http://drop.io/sethvideos
