Design Study: Claw Machine

The other day while I was waiting for some folks to arrive for dinner, I took a look at the claw machine the restaurant had set up in the entry way to extract a little more revenue from parents.

For the most part it was unremarkable, but one feature did stand out to me. I noticed what appeared to be a completely redundant feature. I did my best to capture it with pictures, but it's difficult to see because the parts involved are transparent by nature.

The area of the machine where the prizes are piled up is fronted by a piece of transparent acrylic sheet {Trade names: Plexiglas, Lucite, Perspex.} to contain the toys while showing them off. At the front left of the machine was a square opening, perhaps a foot on a side, where the toy, if successfully fetched, would drop down so you could take it.

What I noticed was on the two sides of the square opening, there was a second layer of acrylic with holes drilled in it that appeared to be doing exactly nothing. It was being held in place with a set of white, knurled knobs on either side of the sheet that presumably thread into each other to hold the sheet in place. The second layer appeared to be adjustable, with five different possible heights the screws could be set to. The fixed piece of acrylic itself appeared to have two sets of holes in it either in error {The spacing of the holes didn't line up between the two sheets.} or to allow some amount of very fine-grained adjustment.

I have two guesses as to the purpose of the movable piece of acrylic.

The first is perhaps to allow the toys to be stacked even higher, although I wonder how that interacts with the mechanics of the claw dropping down.

The other is that the second sheet can be raised higher to prevent attempts to reach inside the machine and grab toys. In that scenario, I can only hypothesize that how high to set the shield is the product of two factors: how valuable the prizes are and how long someone would be able to attempt to steal from the machine unmonitored. In its current position, in a high traffic area of the vestibule of a restaurant, filled with toys of purely novelty value, the shield is completely lowered because the risk of theft is nil. But perhaps in another life this machine would be filled with more valuable goodies and put in a less monitored spot.

In either case, the logical storage position for the shield, even though it is currently not in use, is right there in the middle of the machine, instead of tucked away somewhere out of sight. In practice, being transparent, it is effectively invisible to all but the most bored observer.