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Student's Puzzle Facade Project Is an Architecturally-Scaled Game

Student's Puzzle Facade Project Is an Architecturally-Scaled Game

In his school project, Puzzle Facade, Spanish designer Javier Lloret decided to transform the exterior of an Austrian museum into an interactive piece of architectural entertainment: a giant Rubik’s Cube. Lloret wirelessly connected a 3D-printed handheld cube to a laptop responsible for controlling colors on the facade of a nearby building roughly shaped like a cube: the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. The building proved to be an ideal canvas for the project as it was already furnished with an LED-lit media facade.

The cube is equipped with electronic components enabling it to keep track of its orientation and subsequent rotations. The data is sent wirelessly via Bluetooth to a nearby laptop which runs software specifically designed for the project. The software enables the building to change color each time the handheld interface-cube is moved and twisted.

Solving your own Rubik’s cube is difficult enough, but the 3D-printed controller for this larger-than-life version of the game presented even more challenging obstacles. The cube is white, making it harder for those who have memorized the color pattern of a regular Rubik’s cube to solve the game. Moreover, due to the location and nature of the building, the player is only able to view two facades at the same time, which increases the difficulty in solving the puzzle.

Javier Lloret developed this project as part of his thesis at the Interface Culture master program at the Universitat Kunstlerische and Industrielle Gestaltung Linz.

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