Date: December 2017 - Now
Project Type: Team project
Member: Tatsuya Kato, Shion Ito, Toshikatsu Nakamura, Toshiki Sato
Location: Chofu-shi, Tokyo, Japan
My role: Industrial design, concept design, contents design
In the world we are living in, sometimes our actions are defined more by our surroundings than by our desires. For instance, we hang our jackets on the back of a chair, not necessarily because it's the best place for them, but because the chair's shape and convenience make it a natural choice. Both visual and tactile properties of objects and context elicit our actions, a concept sometimes referred to as Affordance.
We found this phenomenon interesting and decided to develop a game console that utilises the properties of 3-dimensional tangible objects to provoke players' actions. In this project, we see objects as a resource from which players can extract their potential.
After consideration, we decided to mount a 3-dimensional acrylic screen on the game console with which players can interact. This 3-dimensional screen is interchangeable, allowing players to enjoy different game content based on the shape of the objects. For instance, when a cube is mounted on the console, the player can enjoy content that requires them to change their viewpoints to comprehend what is happening on all sides of the cube. We believe that, as part of human nature, cubic objects have aspects that people can’t fully perceive from a single perspective, and this inherent curiosity provokes us to explore and see more.
The significance of this project lies in the way we designed the game console. Typically, the shape of a game console is determined by the type of games it will host. However, in our project, we took a different approach: we first defined the physical shape and form of the game console itself, and then the game contents were conceived to align with and utilize specific shapes.
Our ultimate goal is to make the design of the game console open-source so that anyone can join in discovering new ways of playing with 3-dimensional objects. This openness will encourage innovation and creativity, allowing a community of developers and players to continually expand the possibilities of this interactive platform.
This project was featured by Designboom and Yanko Design.
