Block Party

***WINNER, Best of Hardware Track; MIT Reality Hack '24

***WINNER, Overall Silver; MIT Reality Hack '24

***Honorable Mention, Augmented Productivity; MIT Reality Hack '24

Block Party is a whimsical platform for connecting physical and digital realities.

What it does

Place a cube IRL. See it in VR.

Touch a cube in VR. See it light up IRL.

Stack cubes to unlock other objects in VR.

Shrink down in VR to see your physical build from a whole new perspective.

VR Block Party allows someone to be in the real world stacking blocks and building something new. At the same time, someone in VR can be interacting with those blocks and seeing exactly what the person in the real world is building live. When the person in VR interacts with the cubes, the real world blocks light up to indicate this interaction.

The Concept

The team (me, Y. Jenny Wang, Quin Henthorn, Erika Bulger, & Emerson Segura) came around the vision of creating a project where actions in VR affected things in real life, and actions in real life affected things in VR. We first ideated using post-it note brainstorming with all team members coming up with as many ideas as possible within a few minutes. Then, we each remixed the initial ideas into a project concept we pitched to the team. Finally, we voted on the pitches to determine our main concept.

The Board

The board is a 3x3 grid which allows you to place cubes on it and can sense these cubes as well as light them up. An ESP32 is controlling the board and measures a sensing voltage to detect how many cubes are stacked on a grid space. The ESP32 is also controlling the individually addressable LEDs inside each of the cubes to add a greater level of presence and interaction.

The Cubes

Inside each of the cubes is a simple circuit which consists of one resistor and 2 LEDs. The resistor connects to the sense pin on the ESP32 and each additional cube drops the voltage the the ESP32 is reading on that sense pin. The LEDs are ws2812b's which can be strung together and individually addressed to create entertaining effects.