Derek Chan

Assignment: Final Project – The Tarot Trunk
Date: December 16, 2009
Course: Fundamentals of Physical Computing
Instructor: Robert Faludi

This group project between myself, Eric St. Onge, and Russ Maschmeyer, consisted of multiple layers of interaction. From the onset, we wanted to challenge what we could do in this final project not only with what we had learned in Physical Computing, but to bring in other acquired skills in the classroom and beyond.

While brainstorming for possible ideas to start this project, we knew we wanted to tie in Twitter as a method for sourcing information. The themes of tarot cards, psychics, and mysticism came up afterwards when we were trying to find the right narrative for our approach.

The project played to each group member’s strengths as well. Although each of us helped out in all areas of the project, Eric was able to put together a lot of the code to get the communication right between Arduino, our web service, and Twitter. Russ masterminded and tinkered with a lot of the circuitry, and his amazing intuition in complex electronics helped set the foundation for our project’s physical form. I took on the reins of constructing the story behind the Tarot Trunk as well as conducting the research towards designing the trunk’s interface.

Some of the wiring on our initial prototype

Tarot Trunk’s “mystic powers” were a result of interactions taking place on Twitter. Through the trunk’s Twitter account, TarotTweeter, we were able to gather replies from the “Tw-ether” to use as a fortune to give back to patrons interacting with the trunk. The final output of these fortunes was in the form of a little receipt print-out.

Prototype used for user testing

When it came time to put everything together, we worked hard to build out the trunk’s form. Russ found an antique trunk from a junk store and we built all the components for it individually. The presentation of the trunk had to align with the theme we had created for it, which was centered around mysticism. As such, lights were installed to emit an “aura” whenever someone walked up to the trunk (using proximity sensors hooked up to LEDs). The crystal ball also glowed to show when the trunk was ready to accept the patron’s “energy”, which was essentially the submit function to get the trunk communicating with Twitter. All the technical details were invisible to the patron, which was exactly what we wanted. To them, the experience we were curating was an interaction with mystic forces that played on their feelings of curiosity and wonder.

Tarot Trunk in its final form