Making of "The Garden of Time"

The maze was built from a Cuboro game system (they were great and sent us some great cubes with forking paths and accelerators). Cuboro is basically a child's game were you can stack wooden cubes cut through with different tracks and drop a marble in one of the entrances and see it come out in one of the exits:

Photo from www.cuboro.ch 

This system was a perfect match for our project but we needed to turn it into some kind of electronic control system for our videos. Our solution was to augment some of the cubes with micro-switches with levers to detect the passing marble:

Since we just needed three of these sensors, the easiest way to read them in a Max/Jitter patch was to connect them to a standard mouse, so we took one apart and replaced the mouse's micro-switches with ours:

Doing things this way greatly simplified the project since we didn't need any Arduino to connect our sensors, we just used a [hi] object in our Max patches. Here's a first test with the sensors:

In order to incorporate these sensor augmented cubes, we built a small stand with holes to fit the wirings (the image shows the stand without the holes and upside down):

">Our final maze has one entry point (in red) and two forking cubes so that we get three exits: