Pik of Kont?
The great thing about developing technical skills is that it becomes easier every day to use them to tun some funny jokes into playful interactive reallity in a matter of hours. That is what this project was about.
This one-afternoon project I did together with Oscar Pasveer is based on a schoolyard joke where out of the blue a friend puts their finger under your nose asking the question 'Pik of kont?' (Cock or asshole?). There is nothing more to it. We thought it would be funny to make a pik-of-kont determination machine in the shape of a decorative mask that you could hang on your wall.
We used an ESP32, a PIR sensor (hidden in the nose of the mask) and a speaker. If you put your finger under it's nose you will hear a sniffing sound followed by either 'pik' or 'kont'.
Images
do this to interact with the mask
Testing the machine
place in the living room
Reflection
I love to prototype and I think we can learn a lot from making something quickly, putting it in the world and checking the reactions, rather than working out plans before testing basic assumptions. There were no assumptions for this project. It was just a joke. But the rapid prototype still happened.
We were joking around on a birthday that it would be funny if something like this existed. Normally this would stay a conversation, but this time we actually sat down the day after to make this. It is hanging in my home now and I'm using it quite often walking by, or showing it to friends when they come over. There seems to be an interesting attractive force to making a gamble and see what the outcome of a random action is.