“The goal of the Physical Tic-Tac-Toe project is to move a well-known game into the physical realm. Originally, the game is played by two players on a piece of paper - by putting X and O symbols in turns. Our idea was to examine players behavior when confronted with a radically different form. Additionally, we really liked to explore Steampunk aesthetics by combining the mechanics of gears with electronics.
The key idea behind our project is that the game fields states can be represented by the shape of the bendable material. Fields have 3 different states: X, O and NULL (unused field). We had to come up with a way to reduce the number of actuators needed to make a transition from one to another state. Having drawn a few sketches we realized this number can be reduced to just one. Sketch below summarizes our design process.”