Background
The organisers of the V&A Museum’s 2021 Digital Design Weekend has seen the fully remote telepresence robot jousting I’d run for that year’s Love to Play festival and might work well as part of their event. They were keen to tie it into the Alice in Wonderland exhibition that was running at the V&A at the time. I remember the the second instalment of the Alice story contains a fight between two mounted knights, the white knight and the red knight. Those knights have helmets in the shape of horses heads (like the chessmen) so I designed a folded paper helmet for the little paper knights.
The Game
Unlike the previous events I had run with the Smartipresence system, this time there were going to be people physically present in the museum, but we were keen to connect those people (and the physical space they were in) with people who were joining remotely. I made this sketch to describe how I thought we could do this.
There would be two Smartibot robot unicorns, each connected to an iPad running the Smartibot app in Telepresence mode. One of these would be available for players from around the world to connect to whilst the other could be controlled by visitors to the museum.
We printed A3 templates so that visitors in the museum could design their own knights and then cut out all the parts, fold them and glue them together.
We then put their knights on the Smartibot unicorns which we placed on the chessboard like playing surface.
We were keen that players had the same chance to win whether they were in the museum or not so we made everyone drive the unicorns using the Smartipresence pilot web app. We had some iPads we could lend to visitors so they could do this but we also put the links to drive each unicorn online so people from anywhere in the world could drop in and control one. Before the event we built a system the put users in a queue if the robot they wanted to drive was not available.
We ran the activity over three days and it worked really well (Here’s a Twitter thread I did at the time with videos). People in the museum made some absolutely beautiful knights and we had remote participants from all over the world (Argentina, Texas, Indonesia, all over the UK and Europe). We even had a few people make knights and participate in the museum on one day and the participate remotely from home on another, which was very pleasing.
I’m excited about what we can do next with the technology as it seems like both an effective way to bring people together and an interesting way to empower people to make their own games.
Photos from inside the museum by Hydar Dewachi.