Flying Carpet Game Controller

In the course ’3D Prototyping’ our objective were to design a game controller for the game Flying Carpet in which you fly a magic carpet and collects gems and returning them to the home base.

The process consisted of an initial bodystorming session to get familiar with the interaction with classic game-controllers, the body and a flying carpet. Then a field study with 3 kids from a recreational youth centre where we brought a few low-fidelity prototypes in foam, tree, plastic and clay of early designs to evaluate with the kids.

Upon the evaluation and empirical data collection we decided to go with a controller with interactions as close to riding a flying carpet (as weird as it may sound), with the five build-in interactions of the game in mind: yaw, pitch, roll, throttle and grab.

The final and printed prototype consists of a fairly large controller with two handles, where the right is a throttle when turned (potentiometer) and both handles is triggering the grab function when pulled out (a clever hack with a string, a hair elastic, a few hooks and a slider sensor). A build in accelerometer takes care of the yaw, pitch and roll interaction by tilting the controller in any direction.

After the course I was offered to be teaching assistent in the course, which I accepted. This included buidling a 3D printer from MakerBot.