Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2017 21:34:57 -0800
From: Paula Te
Subject: witness in the world
Long story short: 

Inline image 12

It still needs the path illumination and sounds. But we'll get there :) 

---
Long story:

We started playing the witness at the offsite. Luke also brought a PS Vita and I played with that too; it has a gajillion control/sensors (a touchscreen and joystick/control pads, two cameras, a capacitive touch-sensitive backside (heehee)), which got me to thinking, when would you want to use a touchscreen over a joystick/control pad? Which then got me to thinking, would you want to play the witness with a touchscreen? Using a control pad for The Witness is a kind of indirect manipulation interface that feels good; if you were using a touchscreen and sliding your finger among the pixels, it would be a little jarring when the slide-y light underneath your finger suddenly stopped following your finger (because it was blocked by some part of the puzzle). 

You'd want to use direct manipulation when your finger couldn't just slide over all the obstacles.... i.e. when the puzzle is an actual physical object. Think of your finger tracing the mortar grooves on a brick wall. Having a token inside of the groove to slide around would also feel good. 

I copied a puzzle from the witness and laser cut it:
Inline image 13
To assemble, I spray glued the puzzle to a flat piece of posterboard. I put a paper mask on the part of the puzzle I didn't want to stick to the board.
Inline image 4

After laboriously peeling off the backing, I got this: 
Inline image 7

And then removing the masked piece reveals the in-set puzzle:
Inline image 8

This particular witness puzzle has another maze-head which mirrors your moves at 180 degrees. Luckily, we have a table which can track your moves and move another object. 

All I need to recreate the mirroring is a line of code (well, a couple lines) that mirrors the coordinates of your token. 
Inline image 3
Inline image 10
The physical puzzle provides the horizontal and vertical constraints; no need to hard-code in the linear movement. 

Here's what happens when you move too far and your mirrored friend gets stuck behind a wall: 
Inline image 11

You can also play the game with cheese and crackers.
Inline image 9


Here Josh is playing the original puzzle with the token table peeping in the background.
Inline image 2