Interaction - Bachelors

The Toll Board

The Toll Board seeks a new and innovative approach to how awareness campaigns can be run to renew audience attention by offering something they have yet to see.

Formed around the basics of a pinball machine, the Toll Board uses coins as the projectile to help people connect to the events on the board. Such events are each themed around potential hazards or considerations that need to be made by everyone while on the road, with each having engaged direct or indirect tangible interactions. The user, represented by the coin, travels down the board encountering different hazards each with different affects and outcomes on the trip. Upon reaching the bottom the user is either returned to the start to keep the trip going or their journey is cut short with them earning a score based on how their trip turned out.

Kyra Verdel

Click HERE to view 3D model

ThE HAZARDs

While there are countless dangers constantly present a selection of the most important factors have been included in this project that range from Driving at night to wearing your seatbelt. Each of these considerations has been thoughtfully recreated in a tangible form for the coin to interact with on its way down the board.


Driving In the rain

Many don’t understand the dangers of driving in the rain. The reduced Traction can lead to uncontrolled and unexpected movements. Here this is imitated by a series of oscillating pins that interrupt the path of the coin potentially sending it off course.

Wearing Your Seatbelt

Something we all know we should do, yet so many people try to skip out on it. It’s there as your last line of protection in the worst-case scenario and that’s exactly its purpose on The Toll Board offering a safety net if the coin goes astray but only if you remember to buckle up.

Driving at night

Another commonly overlooked part of driving that has inherently higher risk then driving on a sunny day, driving at night significantly reduces the amount of information you must make discission on and react to leading to unexpected dangers that aren’t as risky during the day. To capture this the associated portion of the board is blacked out apart from a small cone for your headlights, using only this limited visibility users need to avoid falling into an obstacle by finding them before it’s too late.

Traffic Light

A simple but important feature to finish it out. Here the traffic light is represented by a rocking platform that can redirect the coin either towards the goal during a green light or the end during a red light.

Texting While Driving

Probably one of the most avoidable but also the most dangerous hazards the average person is exposed to texting while driving takes your attention away from the road meaning you have the potential to find yourself in a very different situation very quickly. Transitioning this into the board is a more literal interpretation of this description with the coin falling out of sight through the phone then later reappearing at random other point on the board forcing the user to react to this unexpected situation.

In addition to the symbolic functionality the phone also offered a perfect way to provide additional information about the various hazards directly to the user along with providing the more typical gameplay related information such as score.

Intoxication

One of the more classical behaviours that has constantly been at the focus of driving safety awareness campaigns is being intoxicated while driving. Either drugs or alcohol the problematic affects are largely the same, impaired reaction time and reduced situational awareness. This is probably the biggest reach in terms of transitioning this into a tangible interaction out of all the hazards incorporated in the project but here the delayed reaction time is represented by a rotating wheel styled after an exhaled smoke cloud that can temporarily trap the coin as it rotates around delaying its exit and changing its direction.

HoW It all works

Click HERE to view disassembled project

The Mechanics

To incorporate all these different and vastly different features I wide range of mechanisms need to be implement mostly from scratch to fit the unique limitations imposed by the design. After hundreds of hours meticulously designing making, testing and redesigning almost every aspect of the design the final product achieves a wide range of functionality through only a limited number of electric motors. Almost all the detail is spared from this overview to keep things short but if you are interested in the specifics feel free to get in contact with details at the bottom of this page.

The Electronics

While mechanical systems where the focus electronics were essential in getting everything going in the first place. An Bluno Mega 2560 was used to interface all the different components and handles everything, receives the individual hit signals from the pegs through a multiplexed web, controlling the speed and timing of the several motors used across the board and syncing the LED shift both actively and passively.

How it was made

The entire design process revolved around a 3D model designed in Autodesk Fusion due to the complexity of this project and the hundreds of complicated parts. Utilising the CAD software allowed for most of the major problems to be identified prior to any physical prototypes being made, significantly reducing the time it took to iterate through design stages to reach a outcome.
When a physical prototype was made the primary materials used were acrylic, fibreboard, and printed PLA. For most of the small-scale prototyping of the mechanisms using a 3D allowed for rapid testing and refinement of tolerances and functionality at very low cost. The fibreboard is the first thing used once the scale gets too large for 3D printing since it’s a cheap sheet material that can be easily shaped from the CAD file using a laser cutter. The last material, acrylic was used when the fibreboard was no longer strong enough for the application, or special circumstances such as the front window.

Kyra Verdel

Kyra is currently studying a dual degree in Interaction design and Electrical Engineering. This has provided him with a unique set of skills that has been further tailored toward tangible interaction design which he hopes to encapsulate in this capstone project.