LoopLoop for Sifteo Cubes

UPDATE: LoopLoop wins “Best in Category, Expressing” and “Best in Show” at the inaugural Interaction Design Awards! Read the full press release here.

Our work at Stimulant ranges from massive interactive wall-sized installations to small handheld devices. Our friends at Sifteo gave us an amazing opportunity to work on our smallest device yet.

Designing for “Inch-Scale” Computers

Sifteo cubes, originally featured in 2009 at TED, are sturdy 1.5-inch-square devices with 1-inch screens, not unlike a child’s building block. They have an amazing tactile quality and fit well in hands of all sizes and ages. Sifteo cubes are aware of their own orientation, tilt, direction, and proximity to other Sifteo cubes. A single button is embedded underneath each cube’s 128-pixel-wide screen. They are controlled wirelessly by a nearby computer and come in packs of three (expandable up to six) cubes.

Sifteo asked us to contribute to their launch portfolio of games that focus on kinesthetic learning, spatial reasoning, and collaboration. We whittled dozens of concepts down to a project we’d all love to work on: a multitrack music toy that was more exploratory than goal-based, and would leverage the minimalist and modular nature of the cubes themselves.

Designing for cubes...with cubes.

Passion, Prototyping and Playtesting

We all love music at Stimulant. Many of us have been DJs or musicians at some point in our lives. Combining this love with our penchant for interactive, playful experiences is part of what makes coming into work so rewarding, so it wasn’t a surprise when we after much deliberation we decided to go down the path of making music.

The design team started prototyping the interaction design while our developers researched the technical constraints and possibilities of the Sifteo cubes themselves. The design began on paper, with lots of little doodles of possible screen states, and talking through the interactions between each Sifteo cube. We even used existing, physical game pieces to playtest the application without writing a line of code, and used even verbal beatboxing in lieu of actual audio output.

Bringing LoopLoop to Life

With the interaction model prototyped on paper, we began the process of laying down the technical framework and exploring our visual and audio design options. Sifteo’s development team was extremely supportive of our efforts, modifying their SDK framework and sharing our passion for what LoopLoop could become.

We opted for a visual style that would mimic the inferred emotional attributes of the Sifteo cubes themselves: cute, minimal, quirky, with surprising complexity revealed over time. This look and feel influenced the sound palette and naming of the application, which is a nod both to the onomatopoeia of the patterns, as well as the nature of how the tracks repeat themselves.

Up to six cubes can be combined for longer compositions.

The Stimulant team aggressively stuck to a “less is more” ethic when it came to features, scope, and priorities. We focused on doing fewer things, and doing them better. Iteration and fine-tuning of the technical, interactive, visual, and aural aspects of the project led us towards something that we felt was fun, engaging, and a joy to play with.

You can read more about LoopLoop on the Sifteo website, where you can also find more information on Sifteo Cubes and the Intelligent Play platform.

XRay integrates Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface

When Microsoft showed SecondLight at PDC 2008, we were inspired to make something similar work with our current Surface unit. What you see here is a prototype that takes advantage of Surface’s object recognition capabilities to recognize the position of one or more iPhones on the Surface, and allows those phones to “see through” the images and reveal a second layer of information. The possibilities here are fairly extensive; what’s most interesting to us is the potential for adding a layer of personalized information on top of a public computing experience. This could enable users to capture content and take it with them, or to have the system display a personalized information layer (translated text/larger-print type/private messages) for individual users of a multi-user system.

iPhone was the first mobile platform we dug in to, but we’ve also got XRay working on Android-based and Windows Mobile-based phones as well. Big props to Josh for pulling this all together, and to long-time friend Arthur Mount for the use of his fantastic illustrations.

Balance Bubbles

What do you get when you mash-up Microsoft Surface with a Nintendo Wii Balance Board? Tilt-sensitive surface computing! Yes, this is Surface sitting directly on the Balance Board (it supports 600 pounds, we checked). Here, Josh Santangelo (who conceptualized and coded this mashup) demonstrates a simple application that lets users create bubbles of various sizes and roll them around the table by pressing on the edges of Surface. You also get a sneak peek at the WPF/Silverlight physics engine we’ve been working on as well. Tilt sensitivity adds an extra dimension to the Surface experience and opens new doors on an already highly advanced platform.