Telepresence Unicorn Jousting at the V&A Museum

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.

Hand drawing in black and red showing a checkerboard playing surface on a table with two mounted knights with lances on it. There is an iPad on a stand at each end of the table and to one side is a table with craft materials and a person holding a paper knight.

 

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.

Photo of some knights made from cut out and folded paper and decorated by children. In the foreground is a piece of paper with the net to make one

Photo of some children standing busily around a table covered with craft materials. One child is smiling whilst being handed a pair of scissors by a woman wearing a red paper hat in the shape of a horse head.

We then put their knights on the Smartibot unicorns which we placed on the chessboard like playing surface.

Photo of a man in his 50s and a girl of about 10 standing behind a large table holding iPads. On the table is a red and white chessboard pattern on which two robot unicorns carrying paper knights are colliding. Around the edge are other hand decorated paper knights.

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.

Photo of the table with the chessboard playing surface and robot unicorns with paper knights. There is a smiling child and a man wearing a white paper hat in the shape of a horse head standing to one side and you can see at the end of the table a large screen shows what is happening on the playing surface.

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.

Photo of two small girls standing by the chessboard playing surface wearing the two horse shaped paper hats

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.

Leave a Reply