Pong Drawing Machine V1

Ryerson University
Image Arts - New Media
October 2012 - 3rd Year

This was an actual project that I made in October for my Pong Controller assignment. Unfortunately, I was having so much fun with it, I didn't take any video footage at the time, but I did take a few photos before I disassembled it. It works just as I described; a pen attached to a slider controlled a Pong paddle, while a spinning motor rotated a circular piece of paper underneath the pen, which it drew on as the paper spun. It was a pretty fun project and it was incredibly stable, even if it looks EXTREMELY ghetto, and won me the class Pong tournament.

This is my first drawing machine and I'm pretty proud of it. It may look pretty bad, but it works really well, especially considering its a prototype. It definitely taught me a lot about prototyping and interface design. Funny thing was after I made this, one of my other professors had previously scheduled to bring up drawing machines the week after and I was pretty surprised and glad that I had gotten a jump on the topic. At some point, I want to continue this project. I love the idea of Drawing Machines and that you can have unique records of an experience.

I actually made Drawing machine/application projects for the final assignments of 2 of my classes. This time, it uses the specialized Novint Falcon haptic video game controller. Here are the video documentation.

Falcon Draw: [link]
Falcon 3D Drawing: [link]