RFID in parkour & urban orienteering

First year industrial design students at AHO recently looked at training and fitness equipment. The course encouraged students to look at the interaction design aspects of training, and to include innovative interfaces in their physical designs.

Theo Tveteras based his project around around the experience of Parkour in a project called urban orienteering.

He designed a system that would allow users to set up tracks in urban space, in parks, in the forest or in any freeform space. His system contained of 3 parts: a base station, some roaming discs, and a wearable clip. The base station acts as the focal hub of the system, where users can set up timers, see the best lap-times, and store the rest of the equipment. A number of small discs are placed around the area, each of which contains an RFID reader/writer. The traceur wears a small RFID that clips onto their wrist, shoe or other part of their body.

Mockup of the base-station in place

The experience would involve finding the best route through the discs, and setting up timed competitions around the same route. Different routes could be set up with different difficulty levels. The idea here is to have a base-line: a track through which all participants have to complete, but beyond that each participant can add their own style, techniques and such. Apart from some scenarios and bodystorming, the project didn’t explore the experience in great depth. The project would benefit from looking at the shared experience in this kind of activity, and how it may be made more accessible, enjoyable or extreme.

Display of timing information

Simple scenarios show that the basic interaction works

Although this project focused on physical design issues and largely overlooked technological aspects, the technology seems realistic and feasible. RFIDs strapped to buildings, or re-writeable RFIDs strapped to parts of the body are ideal locations for storing little bits of timing data, all of which can be put to good use in this kind of activity. The traditional downsides of RFID such as limited range, small capacity, and lack of visibility can be used to great effect in urban space. Perhaps a “cheap and dirty” technology like RFID more closely matches the ‘grain’ of urban space than other, high-end technologies.

See more student projects.

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