Icegrapher: an interactive game made for skaters. They can combine their drawing skills with skating.
Client: laboratory group (H)
Location: HUNGEXPO, Budapest (H)
Date: 2011

Concept
Everyone loves drawing, all of us like making different activities. What if we combine skating and drawing? Icegrapher is an experimental game where skaters can draw with their movements and see its result in realtime.

Movements of people are tracked precisely using a custom made tracking software. It is analyzing the stream of a camera which is placed above the participants. Their motion is then turned into simple lines that appear on a large screen. This creates immediate visual feedback so people can understand their relation with the system, they can start playing with it. Then, their regular drawing activity is turned into a truly interactive experience. Some form arise on the ice (laser projection): they have to follow it’s lines to draw together a predefined shape.

While in the skating/drawing process, participants are photographed continuously by an automated digital camera. Then a face detecting system finds people in the high resolution picture and place them into a database. When this laser following part of the game is over, some people gets randomly selected from the system. They become visible on the screen indicating that they won some prize (sponsor gift packages) and they can easily find their photos and share their experiments on social networks.

People - Bence Samu (interaction design, programming) / Agoston Nagy (interaction design, programming) / Janos Szirtes (creative consulting) / Agnes Molnar (animation) / Laboratory Group (consulting, product management) - All rights reserved. (c) 2011