Like the previous two projects, “lines in space” and “planes in space,” students were tasked with making a sculpture that used “cubes in space.”  I decided to take a similar route to my “lines in space” project.  I first made a wooden cube and painted it to look like a ? block from Super Mario.  I then created a C# program that used a Wii remote as a motion detector (I had been dying to try my hand at creating my own program that used the Wii remote), and put with Wii remote inside of the wooden box.  Lastly, I set up a green screen and my camera to create a live virtual Mario environment.  Whenever someone would stand in front of the green screen, they would appear at the beginning of World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros. on the projection next to the green screen.

Originally, I had wanted to animate the projection so that when users bumped the physical box, a coin would pop out on the projection’s box.  However, the program I was using to do the live green screening didn’t allow something like that.  Instead, I had a window open on my computer monitor (which was in front of the green screen, facing the user so that they could see it while in front of the screen) that housed this animation.  Whenever someone would hit the physical box, the Wiimote would detect this, send a signal to the computer, and the Mario scene onscreen would animate by having a coin pop out of the (onscreen) box.  Also the Mario coin sound would play!