Building off the work that I did with the Barcode Burr interlock prototype, I came up with this modified pieces shape by augmenting some blocks in certain places to fill gaps, and truncating surfaces in other places in order to turn the previous spiky abstract appearance into that cubic aesthetic that we all know and love.

Whereas the previous prototype was easy to disassemble because those spiky corners gave the user something to grab onto and pull out, the cubic nature of these truncated pieces is such that it's tricky to actually get a grip on individual pieces once the whole structure is assembled. In order to facilitate easier physical manipulation, I extended the long triangular "arm" part of each piece so that it projects all of the way through the other side of the puzzle and thus gives the user something to push against, and used a contrasting color of wood in order to help give visual indication of where to push.

Once again, this was a big moment to celebrate for me because now this new piece shape that I came up with not only has all the cool interlocking properties that the previous prototype did, but also it's much more aesthetically pleasing to touch and interact with, plus from an intellectual viewpoint it is exciting that the shape is a space filling solid now, too.

I quickly realized that the truly neat thing about this new form of interlocking geometry was that it would allow for high-level solution sequences because the pieces can move one at a time rather than necessarily in groups of three, like is the case with most every other puzzle based on the rhombic dodecahedron. Truth be told, my desire to develop a high-level RD puzzle design is why I went down this road of geometric exploration in the first place, so it was not long at all after completing the woodwork on this prototype that I went to town on it with a pencil (at first) and eventually a pen, as I came up with patterns of pins and grooves that I could cut into the pieces in order to turn this into something truly exceptional. I wanted to have as many moves as possible, so just went with the standard "binary progression" of piece movements because it seemed classy and fun.