Jump! is a fun and competitive game where you compete with rival dorms for bragging rights. Located in the common room of an undergraduate dorm, it has a matching pair in the neighboring rival dorm. When you're walking through the common room and see your Jump! display flashing, it means that one of your competitors is doing jumping jacks on the paired device and is racking up points. Hop on your Jump! pad to complete more jumping jacks and beat the competition.
CMU is known to have a diverse, hardworking student body and an intense atmosphere. In some situations, this can lead to students feeling isolated because they focus so much on their coursework. People know that active study breaks can help to do more productive work over longer periods of time, but students often need more motivation to leave their seats and take a break. Our team’s goal is to great a connected device that can encourage students to take quick, fun, and active study breaks that will both reduce their stress and connect to their community. The team will focus on the setting of undergraduate dorm first-floor common areas because this is a semi-public and multi-functional space used for studying, hanging out, eating, and waiting for friends. This space also sees a large quantity of foot traffic because students must pass through the common area to reach their individual rooms. Undergraduate dorms are also known for the rivalries between different buildings, and so the team will focus on creating a device that will add to the competition between dorms and enhance the rivalry.
This team is defining the community as CMU undergraduates who live in dorms. This community is rather large and often looking to connect with others while adjusting to their new living spaces or filling the time between classes. There are about 7000 undergraduates at CMU who come from all over the world (1). About 65%, or 4500, of these students live in university housing (2). The first year of living in a dorm is a big adjustment for most people because they are busy, multi-use spaces without much privacy. Common rooms on the first floors of buildings are gathering places were people study, hang out, play video games, watch movies, or wait for others. People often pass through this space looking for something to do between other activities.
CMU is also known for its intense atmosphere and focus on academic success. Students seem to need to be reminded to take breaks and take care of themselves. While on-campus resources provide some reminders to be active, there’s no consistent activity for undergrads to take a quick, active study break in their dorm. This project will begin looking at the conceptualization and prototyping of an internet-connected device that encourages quick, active breaks while encouraging connections between students living in dorms.
The first precedent is a subway station in Moscow that allows passengers to pay for the ride in squats (1). It started during the Sochi Olympic games as a way to bring sports to more people. To get a free ticket, a passenger has to complete 30 squats in two minutes in front of the ticket machine, which counts the squats for the passenger. In videos of crowds using this device, the exercise brought smiles to the passengers doing the exercise and also to onlookers. Friends challenged each other to do the squats and some passengers upped the ante by doing one-legged squats or more squats in less time (2). Generally, the interaction was met with enthusiasm by users and onlookers who seemed to enjoy the novelty and silliness of the interaction. Not only did the device encourage passengers to take a quick break with exercise, but it also created a fun scenario with smiles and laughter that encouraged interactions with others in the community. Our team will build off of this precedent by also making a small station for exercising in place that is located in a public area to create a funny moment for the participants and onlookers. The sensing method will be different to accommodate the technology available in class, and we will connect matching devices through the Particle cloud in order to encourage competition between different parts of the undergraduate community.
The second precedent is the Underarmour online fitness tracker app (3). Many technologies exist that allow users to connect and compete with friends through an app. The apps collect and share fitness data between friend groups and can motivate users to keep active for some time, but the novelty of the experience quickly wears off. The app cannot display data in physical space because it is only displayed on phone screens. This precedent shows one way of displaying fitness data and competitions that can motivate people to exercise more but does not have a direct physical link to the activity. The app can send push notifications to remind someone to exercise, but that is the limit to the interaction. The team would like to build off of this idea of sharing fitness data between people through an internet connection while building this connection through a physical game space and physical display. A physical display of information will act as the attention-grabbing motivation for passerbyers to stop and play the game. It will add an element of entertainment to the interaction to keep players and their friends interested.
The third precedent is an arcade game called Jumping Jackpot which is an arcade game where players try to match their jumps to flashing lights in order to win points. The game is not a connected device, but it is an example of how arcade games draw the attention of players and encourage them to complete a task. We will build off of the style of the game but change it to fit the environment of a dorm. Our device must be interesting enough to draw the attention of students looking for something to do while also not irritation people who do not want to play the game. This balance will be important to the user interaction and if they accept or decline the invitation to play the game.
The team used a human-centered design process to generate ideas and decide on a concept. We began by researching the needs of the community and prior work done on this topic. With the user's needs in mind, we began brainstorming different ways to solve the problem. We narrowed down the project's focus by eliminating options that we could not execute in the timeframe of the project and with the materials provided by the course. One challenge the team faced was figuring out how to display scores and player status in a physical, interactive, and robust way. We went with a combination of leds and an arrow controlled by a servo in order to make the score both eye-catching and easy to understand. Another challenge was how to ensure a clear connection between the user and their community. Our approach to this challenge was to intentionally place the devices in semi-public areas where there would be enough people to interact with but not enough to prevent use for fear of embarrassment. We also chose the location to capitalize on existing connections and rivalries between groups of students.
Jump! is a fun and competitive game designed to encourage CMU students to take quick and active study breaks, reducing their stress and encouraging connections with others in their community. It's an internet-connected, life-size, interactive device that allows students to play games against people across campus with real-time, physical feedback on the status of both players.
Located in the common room of an undergraduate dorm, it grabs students' attention as they walk through the space. Flashing lights on the Jump! display means that your competitor in a rival dorm is doing jumping jacks and racking up points on their device. The player then hops on their Jump! pad to complete more jumping jacks and beat the competition.
Below is an illustration of this concept.
In this device, a force sensor in the floor mat detects whether or not the player has completed a jump. The display, which shows if you or the other player has more jumps, shows the score with a combination of lights and an arrow. When you jump, your display lights up and the arrow moves towards your side of the display. If the other player is winning, the arrow moves towards their side of the display. You win by completing more jumping jacks than your competitor and moving the arrow all the way towards your side of the scoreboard.
The first step in prototyping was to create a small scale version of the device to make sure that the force sensor and servo could interact with each other as the team intended.
We then worked on prototyping better ways to display the score. This is when we included the led strip and different types of arrows.
The particles were then connected through the particle cloud so that the displays show which player has the most recorded jumps.
Finally, all of the different components of the system were combined for a final round of testing and debugging.
1. Test with users in context and incorporate feedback.
3. Conceal wires and circuits. Correct current draw issue where activating the servo dims the lights. Finalize scorekeeping code and game reset function.
4. Make a stable podium or installation for each unit. Make clear signage so the user understands the game at a glance.
5. Adapt the game to include more than two players and connect a greater community.
Source for light strip code: https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips/arduino-code
All other references are cited in that topic's section.
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