Digifold
Product Design /Interaction Design/ Programming
2020-2021
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What is it?
Digifold is a book of controllers that merges the digital and physical worlds of games through interactive origami designs. Digifold book consists of 26 pages and 5 controller designs.
Why?
This project, aimed at children and young adults, reimagines traditional handheld game controller interactions. Digifold presents an innovative gaming system, combining traditional crafting with digital gaming, allowing players to use origami to play their favorite games.
How?
The designs are printed with conductive ink, turning each black inked section into a touch sensor. With a BareConductive touch board microcontroller, these sensors allow users to use origami as game controllers, enabling interaction with digital games through paper.
User Guide
2020-2021
.
What is it?
Digifold is a book of controllers that merges the digital and physical worlds of games through interactive origami designs. Digifold book consists of 26 pages and 5 controller designs.
Why?
This project, aimed at children and young adults, reimagines traditional handheld game controller interactions. Digifold presents an innovative gaming system, combining traditional crafting with digital gaming, allowing players to use origami to play their favorite games.
How?
The designs are printed with conductive ink, turning each black inked section into a touch sensor. With a BareConductive touch board microcontroller, these sensors allow users to use origami as game controllers, enabling interaction with digital games through paper.
User Guide
Paper Crane Example
To test the origami crane paper controller, I used a simple Flappy Bird game from openprocessing.org. The game ran on Processing software, which managed the graphics, and an Arduino collected input from the paper's ink sensors through BareConductive touch board microcontroller, relaying it to Processing through serial communication.
I modified the Flappy Bird game's code to use the conductive ink sensors instead of keyboard controls. This allowed the game to respond when the sensors detected touch, mimicking the keyPressed and keyReleased functions.
Touching the beak of the bird, starts the game.
Holding the bird body sensor tells the program that the player is ready to play and is currently holding the bird, which activates gravity (g).
Tugging and releasing the bird's tail triggers the keyReleased function. This means the in-game bird flies upwards only when the tail is pulled and then let go.
Other Controller Designs
Tools Used:
Arduino IDE (C++), BareConductive: ink and touch board, Processing (based on Java), Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
Digifold Book