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(Author: Patrick Pogscheba, date: 12/2023)
The Puzzle Cube project is an interactive installation for foyers, lobbies or lounges where people, espacially kids, are gathering or waiting for anything. They could run little games (single- or multiplayer) or other media applications or perhaps just videos or music.
The concept was developed by FFT together with MIREVI team @HSD (Hochschule Düsseldorf) which also did the whole implementation. Different artists were part of the concept teams to develop some apps for the FFT which is not scope of this documentation.
It consists of multiple interactive & interconnected cubes (~60cm x 60cm) which could run apps developed for the system. The cubes houses a small form factor PC, a sensor board, monophonic audio and a high resolution display (1920x1920) without touch powered by a battery pack.
The internal sensor processing gives direct access for apps to the following events and data:
- rotation steps (left|right)
- rotation impulses (left|right)
- translation steps (forward|backward|left|right)
- moving
- orientation (with magnetic north reference)
The sensorboard also delivers neighbourhood informations by NFC readers and tags on each cube side. This information is send out to the wifi network together with other informations regarding the cubes state.
A UWB tracking system can be used to track the position of the cubes also which is done at the FFT. The positional accuarcy with 50cm is not as high as in VR equipment but good enough for most purposes in combination with the neighbourhood. Other tracking technologies didn't quite fit because of line of sight problems with multiple peaople standing around the cubes.
The cubes can communicate with each other over the dedicated Wifi network. Additionally a central server can host a web app for each cube app (a game master app if you will) to control the game flow. Communication is done by MQTT (https://mqtt.org/) .
To control the cubes (run apps, see internals, restart, update, etc) there is a dedicated management app.
Cubes and server are running backend services for different kinds of processings and management tasks which later will be explained in more detail.
The documentation is structured into an conceptual introduction with system and architectural descriptions followed by implementation details and an introduction to app development.