A Strange Cuboid

It might have something to say.

Use left mouseclick ONLY to drag, do not use scroll wheel or right mouselick.
It might not work with every browser, try Chrome. see the code

The design process

The inspiration for this cuboid came from puzzle boxes. I stumbled across this video two years ago about an American craftsman who designed this spinning puzzle box (Spinning Puzzle Box.) It is so stunningly intricate and precise that it changed my perception of puzzle boxes, which I generally viewed as cute little jewelry boxes containing no real puzzle.
I explored further on this idea of discovering secret messages as a form of play. Another example of this is a scavenger hunt. A clue can hide in plain sight, relying on the last clue to pinpoint its location. Although every riddle is usually easy to solve, the real fun lies in the journey of discovery. The strange cuboid is my take on a digital version of a puzzle box, combined with a few whimsical clues as in a scavenger hunt.

Walk-through
Start from the upper left screenshot, progress from left to right, top to bottom. On launch, the sketch contains only a slightly rotated cuboid with "Don't turn me around" on it. Once it is turned around, a slider appears below the canvas. Dragging the slider with change width of the cuboid. Once it's reduced to a rectangle, a grid appears with text "Don't hover over me." Hover over "me" and the secret message appears.

Reflection

working on this assignment made me reflect on the benefits of generating more than one idea early on. Initially, I felt inspired by digital steganography, a process in which the least significant bits of an image are tweaked to embed the secret message without any detectable change in the image itself. My first idea was to exchange the same image between correspondents while turning certain pixels transparent, so that when overlayed on top of a chosen piece of writing, the message will be visible through the transparent pixels. As exciting as it may sound, I fell into the trap of falling in love too early with the first idea. In the ensuing days, I was confronted with the difficulty of imagining other possibilities. Meanwhile, I was stuck in my code while trying to enable manipulation of individual pixels of an image.
What helped me get unstuck was listening to everyone else's inspirations and concepts during discussion. It struck me that my investment in the first idea inhibited divergent thinking. Immediately afterwards, I scratched my persisting idea and started from a clean slate. This time I came up with three ideas at once, taking inspiration from three separate sources: the alien crop fields, tracing letters on one's palm, and the last idea which I chose to pursue, the puzzle box.