Process

Describe how you translated your concept into the outcome. How did you approach the exercise? What were the design choices? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them? What ideas did you generate and how did you refine or reject them? What approaches did you reject?

For our revised project, we first started with a program with a counter to track the amount of water drunk.  However, after reviewing it with some of the professors, the idea was changed to have "water" flood over the heads of those drinking from one of the fountains.  We limited it to only one of the fountains for simplicity and lack of materials, to be noted later.

We first decided on a design.  Via a sensor of some kind, the visual would activate when someone was using the water fountain.  Initially we decided to use a pressure sensor on the button to activate the water fountain, with a projector and laptop on top of the wooden shelves used for advertisement via flyers.  Also, we planned to have two sensors to cover both water fountains and create a kind of water race between the two fountains.

However, on the day of assembly, we had to scale down a few aspects of the project.  First, we had issue finding a pressure sensor, which then turned into a temperature sensor, and then into a laser+light sensor combo, and finally to a single photosensor.  The sensor would still operate like before, though an arduino, but it would be using the blocking of light by someone standing in front of the fountain to activate the animation, which actually allowed it to expand to people refilling water bottles as well as drinkers.  We reduced the whole thing to a single water fountain, although the second one still was in the area of projection.

The next problem was with cables and setup.  Unfortunately, the HDMI cable for the projector and the USB cable for the arduino unit were both not long enough to be placed across from the fountain to the projector, and definitely not long enough to hang from the ceiling.  However, luckily someone lent to us a long USB extension cord, and so we were able to send the input from the arduino to the computer across the ceiling, keeping the laptop and projector together.

The smaller problem after that was that the colors of the projection were affected by the yellow paint of the wall, which was simply solved through experimenting with the colors of the projection to get a nice few blues on the wall.

Finally, we just needed to add a few more touches to the projection and to assemble the whole setup, which was not terribly complicated once we had the right materials.  We had a member who was skilled with the arduino set up the sensor, while another skilled in unity set up our interactive animation.  We added the words Drink Me! in order to entice people to the fountain, and added a small animation to it to make it noticeable, which then eventually became the name for our project.  Effects were added in, as well as our names and class, and after applying a lot of tape to the USB extension cord to the ceiling, a lot of tape to the arduino to avoid short circuits and to keep it sturdy, stacking handouts in order to angle the projector down (it naturally sent projections to a higher angle, so we had to adjust for that issue), and applying black boxes to the projection to cut down on the blinding light possibly seen from the exit from the stairwell and an office, our setup was complete and working.