Gone Fishin’ is an exploration in haptic feedback design that turns the struggle with reeling in a fish caught on a fishing line, into a music-making experience.
The fish’s struggle is emulated using haptic feedback generated by a DC motor controlled with Arduino and the player is given the opportunity to interact with this behaviour through their fishing rod.
The reward of synthesised music (produced using Max/MSP) reflects the struggle between player and fish, producing a haptic/auditory symphony of sound that encourages you to keep playing and find new patterns of music.
The main challenge for development of the haptic feedback was understanding the behaviour of the fish and how, technically, this would be translated to motor instructions to produce the haptic landscape of the feedback. Another challenge was to attach sound to the experience so that the activity of catching a fish is augmented by a music landscape that you create yourself.
This project was developed together with Harsha Vardhan at CIID on the Motors & Music course taught by Bill Verplank and David Gauthier.
