The prompt for the Masterpiece Innovation Project was "How can you use technology and the arts to help engage others or increase participation in what you love to do?"
To view our script, please check 'Project Script'.
We went on different expeditions to different museums, and thought about what interested us and how it made us enjoy it more than other things. The answer, most of the time, was interactivity. If we can interact with the object that we are looking at, we were more interested in the topic and overall had more information retained into our heads once we left the museums.
Our first idea for our project for this year was based on "Cubing". This is the activity of solving a "Rubik's" (Rubik's is the well known brand, but is also the worst) Cube in the fastest time possible. There are many variations of cubes to solve and many different brands to suit preferences. Cubing has a lot of people in a competition, but overall isn't very widespread, widespread meaning there isn't a lot of branching out to the wider world other than the cubers themselves. We first thought of this idea, but then realised that this idea was a bit too hard to get momentum on, so we didn't get any further than what we were able to do initially.
We then pondered for a few weeks, wondering how we could extend further, and we were given a deadline by our coach (12/10/23) to come up with a way to actually do what this year's theme is about (showing our chosen hobby or art form and extending it to be shown to the wider community) as we hadn't done that or choose a new topic and basically start over again.
Then, we looked at our list of hobbies and decided on Sword Fighting. A small model would be easy to create, using a brick and a motor. The concept of our way to share it using tech was to create a robot to do sword fighting, using a pool noodle (Cut in half) and tape on the handle. We then showed this to our mentor Abbie Neal and coach Ben Stanley, who both critiqued our project idea and gave us some ideas to extend our project and organise our concept.
Each meeting, we would practice our concept for 5-10 minutes, at the end of each meeting, and would get more and more accustomed to each other's movements. This will hopefully simulate the learning of the AI, where the AI would "get used" to the player based on their movements and activities, as well as other users around the world.
Boling Yang has completed a similar design (just a lot bigger) in 2021. He is a PHD student at the University of Washington and has a Youtube channel which has other videos similar to robots swordfighting.
Something similar happeed with Shape Robotics, a company that has designed a robot with an arm to move 360 degrees in both y and x axis. They have a website about it, and use the same code that is used for our robot arm.