I see tremendous problems with this design, though. Some I believe can be remedied but others are going to be much more difficult. Thee first and most major problem is that the design lacks every single feature that a good DDR player relies on to position themselves — the edges between buttons can be felt with your feet on any soft or hard pad I’ve ever played on and it’s critical for there to be some kind of tactile indication there. I believe you could fix this problem by building a thin substructure underneath the pad to give the player something they can feel with their feet rather than just relying on some kind of invisible (or tape) grid to tell them where their feet are.

The second big problem is that the pads design gives it a very large raised edge. I can say with some certainty that if I played on this pad I would trip on the edge and fall. I have big feet and go ‘outside the lines’ a whole lot. Other people might not have this problem.

The third problem is that you have to break the beam to register — so you have to put your foot dead center on the beams axis to get the step to trigger. On a real pad you can register the step by pressing on the very edge of a pad. This is an absolutely critical feature for advanced players.

The last major problem I see is that technically the pad is open for cheating since you can trigger two of the standard arrows by stepping into a corner. Although some people (particularly advanced ITG players) are fairly adept at triggering two pads with one foot anyway, taking it down to this level of ease is a little much. I think this problem is solvable too though — but to keep a design without an interior frame, you would need more beams to make it work.

The last (minor) gripe is that you cant play anything other than 4-button songs. Again more lasers or a different beam design could enable this but it’s still going to be easier to use mechanical switches.

I think that if you really want to build a solid state optical pad the best way would be to use take a cue from the multitouch builders out there and use (fairly thick) polycarbonate steps that are illuminated from the side with IR. When an object is in contact with this from the top it should reflect a lot more IR down underneath than the blank panel would. Using an IR sensitive phototransistor or photoresistor and some nice little PIC code that compares the input of these to a baseline calibration reading of the empty pad you should be able to build a quite sensitive and responsive solid state pad.

Thats 105% cool!!!

To which I would add
“Including a fog machine and adding nozzles or holes to the frame would increase the coolness factor by another 82%”

Jared Bouck
Inventgeek.com

eg:The problem: cant determine whether its top left or top right that is pressed…

[X| ]

What is this place becoming? slashdot?

Another thing that is very important to more advanced DDR players is the variation in height between the button and non-button areas on the dance platform. Buttons in the arcade are sunk by a few mm and this little difference is vital to determining your position without looking away from the screen.

I see a lot of “unique” ways to build a DDR pad, a someone who plays DDR daily I’ve researched many of them before and simply abandoned the idea once it was determined to be unsuitable.

I’m all for “hacks” as as much as some hacks are useless I’ve always felt the ultimate goal to be expanded functionality of an original design. I guess I don’t understand the point of a completely fabricated device with less functionality then the device it emulates.