Fairground: Thrill Laboratory

The team designed, implemented and deployed a wireless telemetry system that used wearable technologies to capture live video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration data from riders. This data was then streamed to large public displays and was also recorded. The technology was embedded into a live theatrical event at which riders were selected from a watching audience and their captured data was subsequently presented back to this audience and discussed by experts in medical monitoring, psychology and ride design as part of a ‘Thrill evening’.

Thrill: the telemetry system and an expert discussing the ‘expert’ visualisation.

Three different visualisations were created for different displays: a scientific analysis style visualisation similar to a Math-lab interface that was used in the expert discussions; a non-expert visualisation of the data in which the live video and audio streamed from the helmet camera were overlaid with a simple visualisation of the biometrical data that was projected in the Dana centre café during the second part of the event; and a more impressionistic visualisation in which the live video from the helmet camera was projected on to a building opposite the Dana Centre with streaming binary data overlaid on it.

Thrill: the ‘non-expert’ and ‘public building’ visualisations.

Fairground: Thrill Laboratory was performed as a series of six events that were staged in October and November 2006 on three successive Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at the Dana Centre at the Science Museum in London. Central to each event was a different fairground ride that was hired and erected outside the Dana centre. Each ride was intended to provide a distinctive kind of thrilling experience, centred around the three concepts of: pleasure (the Miami Trip Ride), frisson (The Ghost Train) and excitement (the Booster) respectively. More than 500 audience members participated in the experience throughout the three-week period, and of these, at least 25 visitors tried out our telemetry and visualisation system.

Thrill: the Miami Trip ride

Enlighten at Magna. This is a collaboration between Equator and the MAGNA Science Adventure Centre at Rotherham with additional funding from NESTA to create a permanent public installation to enable their visitors to learn about the history of their building – a massive ex-steel mill. The aim is to create a large-scale interface that is both engaging to use but that also engages spectators, attracting them to it and allowing them to learn how to operate it by watching others. The project revisits the interactive flashlights technology from the Equator Devices challenge, but scales it up by using mounted searchlights rather than handheld flashlights. Six specially constructed searchlights are mounted on the railings of a large steel gantry that runs through the centre of the building, enabling visitors to point to disused steel making machinery that is tens of metres away. Video cameras mounted above these installations capture images of the flashlight beams which are then processed by our image processing software that triggers various forms of output including audio and video displays and also special effects including a smoke machine. Enlighten at MAGNA opened to the public in November 2006.

Flypad: This is a collaboration between Equator and the artists’ group Blast Theory to design and implement a permanent installation for a major multi-million pound new arts centre called The Public being build in West Bromwich. Flypad is a multi-player augmented reality game. Twelve players at a time can stand on footpads in front of a mounted screen. On the screen they see a video display from a motorised camera that shows them a view of the large atrium beyond the screen. As they step on the footpad so they control this viewpoint, looking around the atrium. They then see their 3D avatar overlaid on this video view in such a way that it appears to be falling through the atrium. By working the footpad they can steer this avatar, colliding with other players and wrestling with them in mid-air. Some of the design concepts emerging from Equator have been instrumental in shaping this work. Additional large spectator interfaces mounted high above the atrium attract and engage spectators and a ‘priming’ interface on each footpad display carefully engages these spectators as they step up to become players. Flypad is due to open to the public in the first half of 2008.

A searchlight device at Magna (left) and an image from the Flypad design brief
showing the twelve public interfaces and the large spectator interfaces (right).

Papers

Walker, B., Schnädelbach, H., Rennick Egglestone, S., Clark, A., Orbach T., Wright, M., Hui Ng, K., French, A., Rodden, T., Benford, S., Augmenting Amusement Rides with Telemetry, Proc. Advanced Computer Entertainment, ACE 2007, ACM, 2007.

Dix, A., Sheridan, J., Reeves, S., Benford, S., and O’Malley, C., Formalising Performative Interaction, DSV-IS, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3941, pp. 15-25, Springer, 2005.

Reeves, S., Benford, S., O’Malley, C., Fraser, M., Designing the spectator experience, Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Public life, Vol. 1, pp. 741-750, 2005 (Winner of A Best Paper Award).

Benford, S., Crabtree, A., Reeves, S., Sheridan, J., Dix A., Flintham. M. and Drozd, A., Designing for the opportunities and risks of staging digital experiences in public settings, Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Games and performances, Vol. 1, pp. 427-436, 2006.

Benford, S., Pushing the boundaries of interaction in public, Interactions, 12(4), pp. 57-58, 2005.

Reeves, S., Pridmore, T., Crabtree, A., Green, J., Benford, S., O’Malley, C., New forms of interaction: The spatial character of sensor technology, Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Designing Interactive systems DIS ’06 , June 2006, ACM.

Sheridan, J., Dix, A., Lock, A., Bayliss., A., Understanding Interaction in Ubiquitous Guerrilla Performances in Playful Arenas. In S. Fincher, P. Markopolous, D. Moore, & R. Ruddle (Eds.): People and Computers XVIII-Design for Life: Proceedings of HCI 2004. ISBN 1-85233-900-4. London: Springer-Verlag, Leeds, UK, 2004, pp. 3-18.

Videos

Fairground: Thrill Laboratory overview video (12.1 MB MPEG-1, 252 MB AVI).

Press coverage.