The Jurassic Park Remote is a collaborative PCOMP Midterm project with Cole Orloff.
The idea
We spent much time in developing a idea that we're satisfied with.
Here’s our idea. We want to build a “Book Remote”. Users can control the movie ”Jurassic Park”(play, pause, fast forward, rewind) by manipulating a physical “Jurassic Park“ book (open the book, close the book, turn the pages). The reason we chose “Jurassic Park” is that the movie completely follows the book.
We put a flex sensor on the spine of the book, and a force sensor on the back cover. When the book is closed, the flex sensor is bended; when the book is open, it’s flat. When different weights are put on the force sensor, the force sensor would tell which chapter is opened up. We used Arduino to collect the data from the sensors, used serial communication to connect Arduino to Processing, and used Processing to play the movie on a big screen.
This idea comes from that sometimes when we read a book, we find a certain chapter is very tempting, so we want to watch the movie about it. So we think it’d be fun to build a book that can control a movie. The fun part would be we can pick one interesting page in the book, and the movie will play from that page.
The circuit
The code
In Arduino, we did two things, passing the flex sensor and force sensor's value to processing, and control the LED light along with the changing of the force sensor.
In processing
We imported a video library, which allows us using "play()" and "jump()" function to play the movie from certain part.
We did three things to make FRS more stable.
1) we used the function "millis" to calculate the time inside the processing, slow down the Processing from reading the force sensor's value.
2) we used the function "floor" to round the force sensor's value, as long as the value didn't increase or decrease more than 20, the change will not effect the movie.
3) we also set a variable called "lastchapter". only when the chapter != chapter, the movie will change.
The prototype
laser cutter
