Scuttlebuddy is an AR experience designed to fit aboard the Cruiser Olympia at the Seaport Independence Museum in Philadelphia. Its main purpose was to help younger students explore their identity and develop an interest and excitement for engineering through a fun and engaging experience.
This was a team research project developed at Drexel University where I worked under Prof. Stefan Rank to help perform game design and development within the experience, general help with the interactivity system of the experience, as well as act as a consultant on engineering concept clarity and accuracy. We also worked with the Virtual Human Toolkit provided by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies to create and modify the human characters within the experience.
The game experience within was one of my major focuses. It is the wooden board seen holding four metal bars covered with leyden jars (which act as capacitors). The game consists majorly of two parallel circuits which have various amounts of leyden jars and sized leyden jars depending on the positions of the metal bars. The players must move the metal bars back and forth to find the overall largest capacitance value for the system so that they can get their communication up and running again to report a mysterious and dangerous situation that had arisen within the experience.