How does 16 hours of squats and thousands of little repetitive actions sound to you? Your kind of party? Well that's what Jen and her team do every day as they try different programs for the pool.
Effectively Jen can make the pool do pretty much anything. Want to allow people to shoot light at each other like the game Pong? No problem. Want to create waves of light based on the movements of the crowds? No problem.
The challenge is not that, it's the nuances. We might not notice, but all great interactions are built down to the tiniest nuance of movement. Think about the real world when you hit a tennis ball on the court. Now think about the Wii and what they had to do to give you the feeling of hitting a real ball in the computer game. Many thousands of programming hours and trial and error went into getting you the interaction that works.
Hence the need to reprogram the pool over and over again to get the interaction smooth, cool and most importantly, fun. It took 7 people 4 hours to reprogram them once yesterday.
First step is taking the covers off all the pods (120 of them)
Next step is reprogramming all of them (here's Carin testing the new program)
Bill also went through all the pods and adjusted the connections between the pod and the electronics
Then you've got to test the interaction:
Bill and Jen checking out the results of the program
Unfortunately yesterday's efforts didn't end well. Turned out the outgoing speed of the light is not the same as the returning speed. Also, for some weird reason the color green causes the pods to freak out and flash different colors.
So that means another 16 hour day trying a different approach. I joined them yesterday for two hours and my thighs are killing me. They've been doing this for two months. Ouch.
