Jumbled Jelly Beans

We partnered with Box Fort, formerly 5 Wits Productions, to create Jumbled Jelly Beans, an interactive rock-climbing wall for an escape room. Players climb around the room using the jelly-bean-shaped handholds, winning the game by ensuring their chosen holds match the colors flashing in the room. After five months of storyboarding and prototyping, my team of five built a full-scale model of the room to test. I was responsible for the user experience piece of the design.

User experience

Guests enter a 12’x12’ room, with ledges at 1.5’ off the ground and rock holds spanning the wall up to 7.5’ off the ground. 30 holds in 3 primary colors span the walls, allowing for a maximum of 5 players at a given time. LED lights underneath the headers of each wall are placed between two strips of translucent material to diffuse the light.

Storyboard

Guests enter the room and see two walls of jelly bean jars. They soon realize these are rock climbing walls

They notice a ledge on the wall and see that the floor looks like a glass jellybean jar has shattered on it, so they climb up onto the wall to avoid the "broken glass."

The lights on the wall flash red for five seconds!

Guests climb around the room while the lights flash until they are all touching red handholds.

After the five seconds of transition time is up, the lights stop flashing and are solid red.

The lights now start flashing purple!

After some confusion, some guests move onto blue, some stay on red, and some touch both. They've figured out that they have to be touching at least one of the two colors that make up purple

After the five seconds of transition time, the lights stop flashing and are solid purple.

After a few more successful rounds of rock wall twister, the guests have won!

Assembly

Holds

We 3D printed rock-climbing holds in the shape of jelly beans, designing three distinct shapes to increase complexity and difficulty. We then used these models to created silicone molds, and cast the final holds by pouring resin into these molds. Holes drilled through the molds allowed for easy attachment to the wall, and sanding and oiling of the resin holds provided an authentic jelly bean look and feel.

Electronics