Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke
In this lab course you will extend the (fully automated) on-campus Area-079 escape room. The escape room is a game where a team of players are locked in the room and has to solve puzzles to escape the room during a limited timeframe. In this course we will extend the already existing room and implement a different game. New puzzels can be added, old ones replaced or modified as long as the existing game can still be played. This will be done in cooperation with Frexit, the Freiburg Exit Game Company.
Your task will be to team up with fellow students (2-3), build one or more gadgets which implements a puzzle and integrate it into the overall flow of the game. This will teach you the basic of ubiquituous computing. This is computing which is hidden in the environment. Devices are fully connected and the user's intention is estimated with the help of sensors (also called Context Recognition). Some also call this the Internet of Things.
Philipp Wirthgen will teach about game design. Bejamin Völker and Philipp Scholl will help you in building the embedded systems and implementing your puzzles. Puzzle Ideas can be gathered from literature on building escape rooms [@Nicholson, @Shakeri_2017, @Ross_2020], while interaction ideas can be gathered from the CHI conference, Ubicomp/ISWC and IMWUT journal.
The overarching goal of this course is to build a fully-automated, fully-playable escape room in 14 weeks and have teams play the room at the end.
You will learn to …\ … implement complex human-computer interaction with networked devices\ … protoype networked embedded systems and integrate sensors into novel application\ … build embedded systems in a team and integrate this in a larger system
This lab course is open for all study programs of the technical faculty at the university of Freiburg. Electronic prototyping and programming skills are required. We will base our work around the ESP32 or ESP8266 chips. The lab course is worth 6 ECTS, and is roughly equivalent to 120-180 working hours, i.e. 8-12 work hours per week. The course is limited to a maximum of 20 participants, and this term to groups of three people.
Philipp Wirthgen philipp.wirthgen@frexit.de
We will primarly communicate via matrix on #ubilab-ws2122.
We will hold 14 session, every thursday 16:00 - 17:00. The first two to three ones are on the basics of escape room game design, and on ubiquituous computing. During those session you will be put into groups and have time to come up and refine your puzzle ideas. Every week we will discuss and test the escape room together with paper mock-ups. we will host weekly trial runs of the puzzle with more and more refined mock-ups. This will allow everyone to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and assures that there will be a final game with working puzzles.
| date | you learn to … | actions/deliverables |
|---|---|---|
| 21.10. | … to define ubiquitous computing … to define an escape room |
intro-slides, groups, Wirthgen's intro |
| 28.10. | … design a basic escape room | escape room story, group and puzzle match |
| 04.11. | … present and plan (A/B/C) a puzzle | group discussion |
| 11.11. | … present and plan (A/B/C) a puzzle | group discussion, bill-of-materials story board |
| 18.11. | … learn to use git … run a basic micro-controller program … exchange message with MQTT |
update respective |
| 25.11. | … learn to use git | update respective |
| … run a basic micro-controller program | ||
| 02.12. | … participate in a co-design | puzzle mock-up |
| … exchange message with MQTT | ||
| 09.12. | … participate in co-design | puzzle mock-up |
| 16.12. | … participate in co-design | puzzle mock-up |
| 13.01. | … participate in co-design | puzzle mock-up |
| 20.01. | … participate in co-design | puzzle mock-up |
| 27.01. | … participate in co-design | puzzle mock-up |
| 03.02. | … present a final prototype | finalized puzzle |
| 10.02. | … present a final prototype | finalized puzzle |
The course will take place in Building 051, Room 00..022 for the first few weeks. Please make sure to bring your 3G verification to every gathering, we will check those and you will need to check-in via hisinone.
Shopping will be organized on Octopart
We already built an automated escape room called Area 079 and an online escape room. You can find code and project examples there.
[1]: Nicholson, Scott. 2015. “Peeking Behing the Locked Door: A Survey of Escape Facilities.” In. http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/erfacwhite.pdf.
[2]: Ross, Robert, and Soula Bennett. 2020. “Increasing Engagement with Engineering Escape Rooms.” IEEE Transactions on Games, 1–1. https://doi.org/10.1109/tg.2020.3025003.
[3]: Shakeri, Hanieh, Samarth Singhal, Rui Pan, Carman Neustaedter, and Anthony Tang. 2017. “Escaping Together.” In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3116595.3116601.