Hey everyone! We have several updates for you based on our progress during the third week of the project:
Design
After the meetings with all the stakeholders, we have a much better idea about the capabilities of the robot as well as the expectations from the project. We also had meetings with different faculty members at the ETC to gain further insight about human-robot interaction. During these discussions, we were introduced to several fascinating designs like the 2-XL Robot and Braitenberg vehicles. We also began research on the psychology behind children’s games and their interactions in varied settings like the school, home and playground.
Armed with all of this knowledge, we began brainstorming and came up with several game ideas based on our current understanding of Cozmo’s capabilities and limitations. The broad outlines of these ideas are as follows:
- Monkey in the Middle
- Field of vision game
- Two players 1 Cozmo
- Hide and Seek
- Cozmo tries to find hidden cubes / custom objects
- Hopscotch
- Cozmo and cubes
- Hop = Cozmo has to lift cubes (Cubes cannot touch the ground)
- On certain tiles Cozmo has to drop the cubes as he is not allowed to pick them up
- There he will walk around on the tiles till he reaches a tile which allows him to pick up the cube and then continues his journey to the end
- The player’s job is to help Cozmo with situations where there are no tiles around that he can lift the cube
- Capture the Flag (Custom Board Game)
- Double Cozmo (2 cubes 2 players )
- Multi player ( 1 Cozmo 2 players – whoever does the right move Cozmo moves to him)
- Mountain or Land
- Cozmo and the player each have a cube
- The land is divided in two parts one is hilly (plateau like slightly higher than the land)
- Second is normal flat land
- Each cube can change colors from RGB
- Player and Cozmo each are assigned a color
- Cube on mountain and a cube on land
- Whichever cube turns green Cozmo has to tap it
- While the player has to <TBD>
- Cozmo and the player each have a cube
- Red light green light (Improv game)
- Cozmo closes its eyes while the player moves the cube close to it
- If the player is seen doing it when Cozmo has his eyes open, Cozmo gets a point
- Balancing ?
- Simon Says (Fast Tap Color)
- Phone/ computer says: a color
- You tap the cube when that happens
- Both player and Cozmo will have a cube in front of em
- Cube colors switch rapidly
- If that color pops you tap it fast
- If the Cozmo / player tap the right color they get a point
- Whoever scores 10 points first wins
- Mini Games for Cozmo Leading to Party games
- Platform – Cardboard / wood prop (Box) that can fit in Cozmo for Foosball like games where the player moves the sticks in out turn to move the cubes underneath for Cozmo. Only the cubes he detects can be used as stepping platforms.
- Pool with Cozmo (labyrinth)
- Game played within a bounded area similar to Labyrinth. The boundaries can either be set up physically or digitally.
- Automatically moving forward + directional signs
- Limited number of directional signs–placed on ground with arrow + marker
- Place these signs to control Cozmo indirectly
- Trace a shape–or reach a goal–or do something in limited number of straight lines
- Alternatively – Chu Chu Rocket-style single player gameplay!
- Press “play” rather than real time
- Cozmo is broken
- Limited movements
- Maybe only moves one direction
- Or starts out only moving “arms”
- Or moves in a curved or erratic path
- Reach goal using limited movement to unlock more range over time
- Maybe time limit adds challenge
- Either control Cozmo directly or indirectly like in previous idea
- Room for a story here
- Limited movements
- Peek-a-boo
- Cozmo happy when he sees your face, sad when you go away
- Copy faces
- Match Cozmo’s expression
- Cube orientation
- Render cube with markers and orientation onto Cozmo’s screen–or on PC–and player must quickly match this orientation in front of Cozmo’s camera
- Multiplayer with *indirect* interactions between Cozmos… Maybe they could both pursue the same cube and both eyes track the cube. Or maybe they could both be holding cubes the whole time and staring at each others’ cubes.
- Speech remote control for Cozmo
- Speech recognition
- Control Cozmo using python speech API
- AR Cubes (i.e. model spawned on cube face)
- Cozmo integrated into a game with PC components as well (maybe asymmetric multiplayer of some kind, e.g. one Cozmo player + one PC player)– potentially useful
- Drawing with Cozmo (attach a highlighter or something)
- Or similar – Stamping or sticking markers onto walls with Cozmo
- Defining area bounds with 3 cubes
- Game that requires surrounding certain things with triangle perimeter–but not others
- A multi-room game, where Cozmo instantiates the room layout internally based on marker in doorway.
- On entering the room, Cozmo would already know where all the obstacles are
- On a smaller scale, this could be used for various physical mazes, etc.
- Or more “virtually” a 2D board game or maze or similar could be instantiated as 3d objects in Cozmo’s world
- Or create AR objects that Cozmo sees as real (maybe Cozmo has a holographic friend–this would avoid limitations of interacting with another physical character)
- Or maybe, say, AR dungeon crawling board game with Cozmo
- *Player could design
- Polarity mechanic maze
- Can invert walkable and unwalkable areas of maze
- Maybe invert based on emotion
- Maybe more than just two states
- Can invert walkable and unwalkable areas of maze
- Physical Sokoban-style game
- Sokoban
- Could we potentially use more than 3 cubes if we covered up the markers? (Since we don’t care about Cozmo seeing them “as cubes” as opposed to generic objects)
- Steal the marble –
- Keep Cozmo in the center and put marbles in circle around him.
- Goal is the get all marbles in limited time when comma is not looking at you.
- Cozmo keeps moving around randomly and if he sees you getting a marble, he wins a point, otherwise you get a point.
- If you don’t pickup marble until some amount of time, you will lose a point
- Simon (Memory Game)
- Similar to classic Simon game, but with 3 cubes ( 3 colors ).
- Cozmo will look at all cubes to highlight the color in any random order and player has to remember order.
- On every correct answer player will get a point and after each correct answer, length of color sequence will increase by 1.
- This will go on until player makes mistake and in that case one has to start again from sequence of length 1
- Odd one out –
- This can be played with 3 cubes between Cozmo and Player.
- The colors on cube will be changed randomly and after few seconds it will stop at particular combination where one of the 3 cubes will be different than other two.
- Goal is to tap the correct cube as fast as possible to get a point
- Version A – Odd one out color with Cubes
- Version B – Odd one out faces with Cozmo screen
- Stroop with Cozmo
- Cozmo’s screen will display different color texts and player has to tap same color cube as fast as possible before times out.
- Trick here is that Cozmo will display color names in different color for instance, it can display Red in Green color text and Blue with Yellow color text.
- The goal is to match cube with color of Cozmo’s text not the word.
- In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., “blue”, “green”, or “red”) is printed in a color that is not denoted by the name (e.g., the word “red” printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color.
- 3 letter anagram
- Cozmo can display 3 letters of word in some random order
- Goal is to identify correct word and rearrange cubes to change order on Cozmo’s screen.
- We can also display correct answer image of that word if player answers correctly. (i.e display “cat” image if one orders correctly in time)
- Simple Math magnitude Comparison Game
- Where Cozmo can display two numbers/fractions (i.e. 2,5 or 5,3 or 3,3)
- Goal is to knock cube corresponding to bigger or equal value
- This gets challenging, if we include fractions. For instance 2, 4/2 is equal
- Light game (memory)
- 1 player, 3 cubes and Cozmo.
- Three cubes randomly light on. At the end, player and Cozmo need to tell which cube is the last one to light on or which light color appear most.
- Rhythm game (pattern)
- Up to three players, 3 cubes and Cozmo.
- Each players own a cube, Cozmo introduces a series of beats/rhythm first, and players need to repeat the rhythm within the cube. A red light will on if the rhythm is incorrect. If a player couldn’t repeat the rhythm for several times, Cozmo will stop him to player. The one who stay to the last will win. The Cozmo will win if all the players are out.
- Memory game
- Up to two players, 3 cubes and Cozmo.
- Both players and Cozmo own one cube. At first, the UI will display 9/or more images on the screen. Both players and Cozmo will look at the images and try to remember these them. After 30 seconds, the images flip and none of them are able to see the images any more. The game starts at this point. The UI will display one image each time, and players and Cozmo need to tap the cube to win the chance to answer the question, in this case, to show where this image is. If he answer the question correct, he will get one point, otherwise he will lose one point. The one who earns more point win at the end win the game.
- Remember the sequence
- 1 player, 3 cubes and Cozmo
- Three cubes will flash according to a certain sequence, after the sequence end, the player and Cozmo should tap the cubes to repeat the sequence individually. The one who is not able to finish the sequence will lose the game.
- Face and emotion
- Each time when a player play a game with Cozmo, the player should added his face with Cozmo’s camera. If Cozmo lose games a lot with someone, next time he saw the person he will show an angry face. Otherwise a happy face and encourage people to play games with him.
- Hide and Find (maze)
- Several cubes with marker on, 1 player and Cozmo.
- The player hide all the cubes in a certain time, for example one minute. After one minute, Cozmo will walk around and looking for the cubes. If Cozmo find all cubes, he win.
- Play video games with Cozmo
- Simple video games such as ‘Give it up’, one player or more depends on the game.
- Create simple video games and show with an interface. Tap cubes to control characters in the game, such as ‘Jump’. Both players and Cozmo tap the cubes at the same time, and try to win the game.
- Private Tea Party / Mine!
- Cozmo stays within a small area with the three cubes around him:
- He goes around in a semi circle tapping each one of them every few seconds.
- If he observes a face, he becomes suspicious and will stare you down for a few seconds before moving on.
- The goal of the player is to steal a cube from him without him noticing it.
- On finding a missing cube, Cozmo reacts and spins around frantically.
- Can be gamified: One point to steal a cube, two points to Cozmo if he catches you (taps on the cube)
- Once all the cubes are gone, he becomes sad and actively avoids any face.
- If he spots a face, he turns away 180 and sulks. Does this about 3 times before agreeing to play again.
Emphasis on emotions and reactions throughout this activity
- Race to the cube (Experimental)
- From meeting with Tina today ,two cozmos race to a common cube placed by the player.
- Going off the emergent gameplay idea that Jesse was mentioning (Braitenberg vehicles). As long as we key in emotions / reactions / win & lose conditions it would be interesting to see what kind of interactions occur (especially when they collide with each other or something)
- Also, a test for durability
SDK
On Thursday, our shipment of Cozmos finally arrived and we could not be more excited!
However, we need to remain a bit more patient until the beginning of next week, when we finally get access to the mobile apps and the alpha version of the SDK. Meanwhile, the team has gone through the documentation provided by Anki and become familiar with the pipeline that will be followed during development.
Art
And finally, in preparation for branding critique next week, we have worked on the draft versions of the team logo, half-sheet and poster. After receiving feedback, these assets will be locked in and sent for printing as well as used in official capacity on the ETC website. The draft versions of these branding materials can be viewed below:
