In collaboration with Weave Lab and DI Lab at IIIT-Delhi, the three of us, while working under Dr. Aman Parnami on the project of Electroadhesion, built an interactive tic tac toe game on an electroadhesive pad. An electroadhesive pad is a simple two-electrode structure which, when provided with a high voltage input sticks to the surface on which it has been kept. Consequently, this electroadhesive pad can be stuck to a vertical, horizontal, or angular surface. The pad can even attract light objects like paper, aluminum foil, etc. Slightly heavier objects like thermocol can be loosely stuck to the pad with a coating of metal underneath.
To build the board for the tic-tac-toe game, we first constructed an electroadhesive pad (its construction can be easily found on the internet), marked a 3x3 grid on it and used a voltage multiplier circuit for generating high voltages up to 4 kV. We even pasted copper tapes along the lines of the 3x3 grid to get voltage differences on the board. To make the tic tac toe units, we used pieces of thermocol coated with aluminum sheet. The aluminum sheet was used to satiate our dual need of-
The potential differences generated on the pad helped us to map the different blocks on the grid and provide inference about whether the tic-tac-toe unit is stuck to that block or not. In such a manner, we were able to make a tic-tac-toe game WITHOUT the use of any external sensors.
The game can be further modified to provide a remote feature wherein two players can play the game without the need for sitting in the same room. In such a modified game we would need to provide an electroadhesive pad to each player. The potential differences mapped on each pad can be sent to a remote server which keeps track of the data. In such a way, we can easily provide an online interface for the game. This implementation serves as a testament to the fact that the same procedure can also be followed for making different games like BattleShip, Monopoly, etc.