Video Jigsaw Puzzle Solution

How It Works

The video puzzle was actually three different puzzles superimposed on top of each other. Each puzzle (viewable with one of the colored glasses) was made up of 2 or 4 copies of the same obnoxious video; each copy of the video may be rotated a different way.

Green glasses - four 3x3 copies of the video each of which was oriented differently

Red glasses - two 6x3 copies of the video one oriented 180 degrees off the other

Blue glasses - two 6x3 copies of the video both oriented the same direction (but 90 degrees off the red video)

So, when they are all put together, it looks like chaos.

This meant that each puzzle had 2 or 4 copies of each piece. Thus one color puzzle could be have each of the copies of the video solved, but putting them together to form one large puzzle was be unknownable without looking at the other color puzzles. The easiest way to solve this clue was to go ahead and solve for the multiple copies of the video in one color. Almost all teams did this in green (green was the most visible without glasses because the intensity had to be turned up since the green glasses had three filters in them) producing four 3x3 completed videos. At this point, it really was just a four piece puzzle with green no longer providing additional information. The uber-four pieces could only go together two ways for red and two ways for blue and only one way that satisified red and blue.

We will post a simplified version of this application on this web site in the near future.

Design Notes

From the start, we wanted to do something with color filters, but what that exact thing was changed about a dozen times.

Finding the proper filter colors was a massive trial-and-error test with theatrical gels. Interstingly, LCD monitors, CRT monitors and projection displays used different filters from each other. For this puzzle, we used:

• Red glasses - Lee filter 029 Plasma Red and Rosco filter 26 Light Red
• Green glasses - Lee filter 139 Primary Green, Lee filter 728 Steel Blue, and Lee filter 158 Deep Orange
• Blue glasses - Lee filter 071 Tokyo Blue

GC Notes

After setting up the four machines, two of them had issues with blue-screening in the USB driver and one of them lost a USB port, so we were pretty panicked. The one that lost the port reacquired it after a couple reboots. Unfortunately the first team was subjected to the blue screening a couple of times, but it didn't happen the rest of the night even though we had to put three teams on one of the bad machines.

Another problem that didn't show up during play testing, beta testing or with the first two teams of the night was that it was possible to lose a piece if you dragged it to the wrong place; one team had to deal with that, but it was fixed for the remaining teams.