Casino’s and AI interfaces (and broadly media technology) are made to be addictive. When exploring addictiveness in an interface I design I wanted to focus on motion and animation rather than aesthetics. After a discussion with Calder in the last class, I knew that I wanted to explore a slot-machine style animation, and the idea was also inspired by Tabi’s first assignment visualizing and selecting individual tokens. So using the same setup from Week 1 (Older PC hardware, local models, and Claude Code) I set out to create my interface.
First, a user is presented with a local model to use for their conversation. Currenly I have three models setup with Ollama and in order to best use its API, a specific model has to be selected.
Similarly to other chat tools, a blank window with an input is presented.
The interesting portion of the tool happens when the model present its thinking (toggled with the checkbox under the input), and it's final output. Each token animates between each option before settling on the best fitting response. Even if a token has one option, it cycles through choices similar to a slot machine. It reveals some of the inner-workings of AI technology for how responses are formed while being very satisfying to watch.