The Waterpark Puzzle begins as software: guests try to determine which waterslide entrance at the top of a building connects with which exit at the bottom, even though most of the waterslides are hidden inside. After guessing—or choosing not to guess—they can experience a first-person ride through one of the slides and begin learning the three-dimensional truth of the structure. As puzzles become larger, guests can save their progress on a puzzle and pick it up later.
But the same software does not have to feel the same everywhere it is played.
For a family fun center, The Waterpark Puzzle could be experienced through a dry arcade-style cabinet, dedicated chair, workstation, tablet, phone, or other interface. The software is the priority; the physical hardware gives operators different ways to present it to their guests.
At a waterpark, though, there is another possibility: Real Waterslide Feeling.
A purpose-built wet installation could combine the first-person Waterpark Puzzle ride with physical effects such as water, airflow, sound, vibration, motion, and other carefully designed sensations. The objective would not be to claim that a chair perfectly reproduces every force of an actual waterslide. Instead, it could make the digital ride feel materially more like being on one while the guest continues solving the same Waterpark Puzzle.
Family fun centers remain the primary frame of reference for Fun Center HPC outreach. They are the kinds of independently operated recreational environments where we most often imagine people encountering Education & Recreation computers. But the idea does not have to stop there. Waterparks or theme parks could also choose to offer Education & Recreation computing experiences when the software and physical interface make sense for their own attractions and environments.
That difference is part of why we are developing Our Hardware alongside Our Software. The underlying computing resources are explored more deeply through HPC Research. Our Hardware is about the physical object the guest actually approaches, touches, sits in, holds, or uses. The Waterpark Puzzle illustrates how one piece of software could move from a phone or tablet to a dry fun-center cabinet and ultimately to a specialized wet installation at a waterpark.
We have created a six-part landscape artwork series to explain The Waterpark Puzzle. All six images appear together in the Art Gallery on The Waterpark Puzzle page. Images 1 through 3 also appear in the Our Software Art Gallery because they explain the game, first-person discovery, increasing complexity, and saved progress. Images 4 and 5 also appear in the Our Hardware Art Gallery because they show the dry and wet physical interfaces. Image 6 also appears in the HPC Research Art Gallery because it explores human and computer problem-solving, computing performance, cost, and the value of different levels of compute.
When the same exact artwork appears in more than one place on the Fun Center HPC website, its lightbox can offer Page Navigator. Page Navigator helps visitors discover those genuine relationships without creating separate copies of the artwork. For example, someone viewing the Real Waterslide Feeling artwork on Our Hardware can discover its placement within the complete Waterpark Puzzle series and this Current post, while someone viewing the computing-comparison artwork can move between The Waterpark Puzzle and HPC Research. The page a visitor is already viewing is excluded from its own Page Navigator results.
The complete six-image series is also available together as The Waterpark Puzzle PDF. The same PDF is listed under Files & Gallery, the site’s canonical place for downloadable publications.
The important part is that a guest does not need to arrive thinking about high-performance computing, engineering, spatial reasoning, or educational software. They might simply think:
That looks fun. I want to figure out where those waterslides go.
And that is exactly the kind of beginning Fun Center HPC is interested in.