Citiplay is an interactive, digital version of the iconic street game hopscotch that seeks to foster a sense of urban play. The game functions much like the game “Simon” by asking participants to remember and repeat patterns by stepping on hopscotch tiles that light up in sequence. Aimed at both the passerby walking by on their way to work, as well as someone who may be spending more time on the street, Citiplay hopes to engage people with one another, as well as create a corporal connection to electronics and data, while enriching everyone’s experience of the urban streetscape.
This project stemmed from the 2012 San Francisco Urban Prototyping weekend organized by GAFFTA. The goal of this hackathon was to quickly come up with working models of ideas to reinvent the city. I met with a great team of makers and within one weekend we imagined and built a prototype of the interactive hopscoth :
We were fortunate enough to see our project selected by the organizing jury, and got to demonstrate the prototype in the streets of San Francisco to visitors of the Urban Prototyping festival. Kids just couldn’t get enough of it.
On the technical side, the hopscotch runs with just an Arduino board, and this tiny platform was able to compute the gameplay, the LED control, the step detection, and the sound synthesis all at once.
I’m grateful that I could meet and team-up with these amazing people :
Martin Bednar, Noah Brezel, Emily Martiny, Paul Mans, Samantha Senn and Laurence Srinivasan.
Intructions on how to build your own interactive hopscotch :
http://citiplay.org/make-your-own/
Arduino code :
https://github.com/jbloit/CitiPlay
Press :
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Urban-Prototyping-Festival-opens-3967459.php#photo-3619835
