Dmitry Korzhenevskiy's Blind Maze Puts You in a Labyrinth with Only Your Sense of Touch
This clever handheld game doesn't let you see the maze from above, but only shows you what you can "feel" by hand.
Engineer and teacher Dmitry Korzhenevskiy has built an electronic maze with a difference: the Blind Maze doesn't present you with an overview of the labyrinth, but only what's immediately in front and to your sides.
"Imagine a maze drawn on a graph paper. But you cannot see it," Korzhenevskiy explains of the compact gadget. "You are standing on a square and can only 'touch' the wall or the absence of the wall in front of you and on the sides. You have to navigate through the maze and at the same time draw a map inside your head or on paper lying nearby."
That's the idea behind the Arduino Nano-compatilbe Blind Maze, a project that began back in 2018 with the creation of a chunky wood-encased prototype with three tactile microswitch buttons and four LEDs. The idea: the LEDs light to show you the presence or absence of a "wall" around the player, while the buttons turn you on the spot and allow you to walk forward — assuming your path isn't blocked.
Admitting the original design was "pretty ugly," Korzhenevskiy built a second prototype, which had four buttons and an LED matrix in a CNC-machined plastic housing. "I still was not satisfied with the design," he says. "I wanted this game to look as unique as possible. For the third iteration I designed custom light pit that uses painted LED inside a white well covered by metal mesh. This makes a nice 3D-kinda look of the light indicator."
The finished game — with the three light-up "walls" and three buttons, plus a vibration motor to make it playable without viewing the LEDs at all — is powered by an Arduino Nano compatible microcontroller board, with what Korzhenevskiy calls "very simple" software. A hidden switch, meanwhile, enables "hardcore mode" — disabling the LEDs so the player relies entirely on feedback from the vibration motor to navigate the maze.
More information is available on Hackaday.io, with a STEP for the 3D-printable case and source code for the microcontroller's firmware, and on Korzhenevskiy's website.