What is Nonsense?
There are few things young children love more than silly things. We recognised this and created our toy, Nonsense, to kindle their enjoyment of silliness. Nonsense revels in the whimsy, the strange and even a little bit in the naughty. It is a set of blocks that play both words and sounds, but with a twist. Kids can...
Showcase report
As part of the HKU Showcase that took place yesterday, Nonsense was on display to all visitors. Throughout the day the Magic Bean team informed many people about the product and how it came to be. We prepared our project room to show off our research progress, multiple old prototypes, artwork, sounds and all of the Nonsense material. By showing people the proof of concept video,...
Wrapping Things Up and A Showcase
Now that the project deadline has passed and our work has been assessed we can proudly announce that both our client and school are very happy with Nonsense. Over the Christmas break the team took a well-deserved break, but now it’s time to get ready to finish up the Sound Toy II project. We’ll be...
Preparing for the final stretch
With just over two weeks left until the deadline we are in a mad-but-controlled rush to get everything ready in time. Our studio is uncharacteristically quiet as everyone focuses on the task at hand, to finish the final prototype and everything that comes with it. We finished a temporary digital prototype earlier this week, which...
Progress is great!
Last week the decision was made to continue with Making Sentences, which has since been renamed Nonsense (temporarily at least). In order to make it as fun as possible and to work more of our research results into the concept we’ve taken a step back to the original version of Making Sentences and combined the...
Onzin Working Prototype
With only two concepts left we created two working prototypes, one for each concept. For Onzin we created a stand alone soundcube. The children can press on a side to play a sound. By placing the cube on the table it plays the sound depicted on the image. Also children can use the cube as...
Sound Racer Working Prototype
With only two concepts left we created two working prototypes to showcase the possibilities of these concepts. For Sound Racer we created a car that reads surface changes and switches between two soundtracks depending on the switch. This concept only shows how it works, by using a color sensor and an accelerometer. Still the design...
Technical prototype
The past few days we have been working on a technical prototype for the Sound Racer and Making a Story. For the Sound Racer we build a detection system that measures the surface so we can link sound to a surface type, in combination with an accelerometer. We have used an accelerometer to measure the...
From a bunch to 3 concepts!
The last 3 weeks we worked on a bunch of concepts and prototypes for our Sound Toy. Yesterday we had our second meeting with our client to present new concepts and prototypes. It was a great meeting and we decided, with the client, to go further with 3 concepts.The 3 concepts are: Chain Reaction The...
Mountain of Evil
Mountain of Evil started as a challenging toy where every minute or so something happened and the different blocks started to do something, for example shake, grow or explode. This evolved into a concept where the user can create their own chain reactions with different blocks, each having a different functionality. In the following video there’s...
Sound Racer v2
After we created Sound Racer V1 we discovered another interesting way to use sounds and vehicles. In Sound Racer v2 every child has a car and can record sounds of the different materials around them by just driving across the material. There are thousands of materials in your room right now. Check your wall, check...
Sound Racer v1
Sound Racer V1 is a concept where children can build their own race track and race over them. While the children are moving the cars across these blocks, the cars start to make sounds depending on the type of block and the form of the line. In the following prototype we showed how the interaction...