For the third assignment, I decided to make an entirely new sensor. To be frank, the one I made for Assignment 2 was rather difficult to transport. My sensor this time is a decidedly simple one. Each of the loose wires in the circuit is attached to a sheet of tin foil fashioned into a sort of sheath, one of which is worn around the thumb, and the other of which is worn around the index finger, as shown in the diagram.
The Processing program associated with this sensor is a two-player game. One player uses WASD to move around a stick figure on screen. The other player puts on the sensor and holds his or her hand in the position shown in the diagram, using the onscreen arrows as a guide. When the stick figure moves between the arrows, this player can bring those two fingers together to squish the stick figure. At this point, either player can press R to reset the stick figure to proper stature.
In other words, this game is basically that thing where you pretend to crush things that look small because they’re far away, like in that Kids in the Hall sketch, but in this it actually works.
Whenever the sensor goes from “off” (fingers/circuit not connected) to “on” (fingers/circuit connected), the Processing program checks to see whether the stick figure is within a certain margin of the arrows in the center of the screen. If so, it swaps the image of a stick figure with the image of a squished stick figure. The program loads external image files to represent the stick figure, but uses Processing’s built-in shape graphics to make the sky, ground, and guide triangles.