Great Street Games is a series of installations in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough that are triggered by pedestrian activity through public spaces, and allow for intra-city competition through increasingly-complex gameplay.
Projected light and thermal-imaging technology are used to create jaw-dropping interactive playing arenas in which the physical movements of players determine the outcome of the games. Develop your game-playing skills as you progress through a number of levels to help your area to victory or to simply have fun.
Games repeat in ten minute cycles. Great Street Games is open to everyone and does not exclude those with limited mobility.
While this is fascinating as a mixed-media installation by the legendary Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler, it also serves as a rather intriguing notion of how one might go about enabling urban exploration. Imagine installations of this sort as tourist-ready guides to urban adventure, or in combination with a metro-area public transportation system, allowing users to navigate or trigger alternate paths through a metropolis, and exposing areas of specific interest.
Even more interesting would be the ability to tie the installation to a specific user’s mobile device, and trigger iterative gameplay with each passing interaction.
You can, by the way, follow the installation on Twitter.
Related posts:
- Two Takes on Multitasking and Gaming
- Amphibious Architecture
- Project Natal vs. Tactile Response
- Making (some) sense of SenseCam
- Who’s Going to Own our Preferences?