A snow globe is a very tactile object. You see it. You pick it up. You give it a shake. Snow falls. It’s a great ‘interface’ that doesn’t need explanation. So out of that simplicity was born the idea of using the physical nature of a snow globe to control images and sound on the screen.

Pick the New York snow globe up, give it a shake and images fade onto the screen together with the sound of traffic noise from the New York streets. Give it another shake to show another image. Keep shaking to stop the images and sound fading. Watch the video below to see it in action:

The idea could then be expanded to use several different globes from different cities around the world such as London, Paris, New York etc. Picking one up would reveal the relevant images.

How it was made

First thing I did was get a Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller and hook it up to my Mac using the Keyspan DB9 serial adapter. I then connected a vibration switch to the circuit (using a modded version of the simple button circuit they show in the BS2 manual). Next I used MacBS2 to program the microcontroller to send out the output from the switch (ones and zeroes) to the serial port.

The next part was figuring out how to get the serial output into Flash. This was done using a Director wrapper with the serial Xtra which simply passed the information received via the serial port directly to Flash using the setVariable command. You could of course just do the entire thing in Director but it was just quicker for me to develop the prototype in Flash.

Once I had all that working it was simply a case of glueing the vibration switch inside the bottom of the globe and fine tuning the reaction of the images and sound to the shake action

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