With this project I wanted to explore the topic of "uselessness" a little more in depth & I created
this entirely useless web waiting room experience.
Once the users click "Take a number", they will be taken into the waiting room.
They will be assigned a randomly generated number, which is "printed" onto the
piece of paper held by a hand in the lower right corner. The user "wins" if they wait until their
number is called by the waiting number system in the upper left corner.
The minimum possible wait time is 28 hours & the maximum possible wait time is around 16583 hours (1.9 years).
The mean value lies at a waiting time of approx. 346 days.
This project was quite challenging for me, as I am still new to "web stuff" in general. At first, I tried
following the "Stories of the World" example from our homework assignments, but I kept running into
issues which were very hard for me to solve, as they tied into the way webpages are created by the code.
I kind of didn't really have the knowledge to fix these (one error that kept popping up was "ERR_HTTP_HEADERS_SENT").
I tried to fix these issues for ~2 days (I think) until I almost gave up.
So I asked Anna Brauwers for help (Thanks again, if you read this! <3 ) and she mentioned that the ""dirty"" way
of achieving my goal would be to use p5 for the waiting room itself and enabling / disabling CSS elements on a press
of a button.... Which I did! And using this approach I got to the same point as before in about half a day AND
I actually understand the code / structure of what's going on! So it was a win-win-win.
All in all, I'm pretty pleased with the result. The goal was to create a silly little website, which it certainly is.
I also learned a lot during the creation of this (and the course of course) about web stuff in general,
which I think is pretty cool.
I am looking forward to now being able to actually create my own portfolio website instead of relying on a cheap,
not-really-customizable template.
This project was made by Vivien Schreiber,
as the final assignment of "Creative Coding 1" - a first semester course of the Master of Arts "Creative Technologies" at Filmuniversität Potsdam Babelsberg.
Credits:
Pixel Font:
"Mobile Font" created by Anke Arnold (www.anke-art.de)
Background Music:
"Local Forecast (Elevator)" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Bell" Sound Effect:
by user "SPANAC", found on https://www.freesoundslibrary.com/ding-dong-sound-effect/