Music Boxing Game - Deisgn

Zihan Qi

The concept of the last version

In the earliest design concept, as shown in the figure, the concept used a boxing sandbag with sensors installed as the input port of the entire prototype. As the first round of user feedback shows, most people prefer to choose an actual physical hit item. The significance of the sandbag is to provide an actual punch feedback, while accurately capturing the user's punching position, it can also improve the user experience. Therefore, in the first concept, the sandbag is used as the physical input port of the device.

Feedback I received

The feedback shows that the concept does not use the user's body as a controller well, and some proposals for wearable devices are proposed in the proposal.

After careful analysis of the comments, I found that the concept does have some loopholes in guiding users to exercise. For example, the user can choose to touch the sensing area of the sandbag to play the game. This wrong method of use is difficult to achieve the purpose of design. Therefore, I adopted the proposed wearable device solution.


Other design process

Due to the insufficient length of ARDUINO's wire, I was unable to distribute each sensor at a critical position in the human body. Therefore, I have conceived two solutions.

1. Centralize the components to make a single body part sensor.

I plan to use the vibration switch module to sense the user's upper limb movements in this kind of solution. The main part of ARDUINO is concentrated on the user's forearm and hand. The following is the code of some vibration switch modules.

During the test, I found that the vibration switch module is very sensitive, so there is a loophole in the detection accuracy. In other words, when the user retracts his arm, the vibration switch module will still be triggered, which may cause operational errors in the game. At the same time, it is not possible to play games with sensors that focus on one part. Therefore, I gave up this plan.

2. Use the extended structure to receive the user's body movement signals.

This method may be too bulky and requires some more complicated external structures to support it, but it is still feasible. In terms of physical feedback, I hope to try to use vibration as physical feedback. But in the absence of related components, I maintained the LED method.

picture of the vibration switch module

Regarding physical hitting objects (sandbags), I re-analyzed my concept. If I use wearables as input ports for the entire concept, then the sandbags can only exist as actual punch feedback. But in my research, the way to guide people to exercise for stress relief is the main way, and punch feedback can also be achieved through other methods. Therefore, I deleted the sandbag part in the concept.