Content

Cardboard Wipeout

2019

A gaming workshop for Studio Digital. Ten hours, ten teenagers. Go!

I developed and led a workshop on digital creativity. The brief was gaming. I wanted some kind of physical computing spectacle to expand everyone’s idea of what ‘Studio Digital’ could mean.

And so: Cardboard Wipeout, an immersive racing game that riffs off the seminal (to me) futuristic video game wipE’out”. We bought two super-cheap radio-control cars, asked the town for all their post-christmas cardboard, and over two sessions improvised our way to what you can see in the video.

In doing so, the participants:

  • Adapted a video game to a new medium
  • Created an immersive, interactive experience
  • Worked through marking-out and fitting-up a three-dimensional figure-of-eight track out of flat cardboard sheets
  • Made vinyl graphics to brand the track and space
  • Learnt how a micro:bit controller can animate special LED strips
  • Learnt how micro:bit controllers can talk to each other and ‘run’ a game
  • Experimented whether first-person video could work for driving the cars
  • An’ stuff…

Most of all, I think the workshop provided two insights:

  • The world is malleable. If all you’ve ever known is passive consumption of media, games, etc., it’s quite a leap to realise you don’t have to accept things as they are: you can break “warranty void if broken” seals and make your own culture.
  • You can make something that looks amazing… even if it’s mega-scrappy when you turn the lights back on. So: you got there, you’re as good as anyone else actually is, now go iterate and make it truly amazing.

Thanks to Jon, Sophie, Naomi and everyone at Contains Art and their Studio Digital programme.

Implementation

The game needs

  • A micro:bit controller to control the game logic, using the A button to start countdown, and B button to manually record a race finish. This micro:bit can also used for finish-line sensor and a/v controller (see below).
  • A micro:bit controller per strip of individually-addressable LEDs (WS2812B, aka NeoPixel). I used 2x 5m, 150 LED strips.
  • A radio-control car and track.
  • Cardboard saws. Yes, they’re a thing: MakeDo, Canary.

Bonuses

  • A micro:bit controller to message audio-visual kit capable of running music, countdowns, lap timers etc., e.g. a PC listening to a serial port over the micro:bit’s USB connection. In the repo linked below, there is a Mac OS X Quartz Composer patch that will do this.
  • A micro:bit in each car can run the game-logic, and opens up much game-play and a/v potential. See this diary post.
  • A micro:bit with sensor to detect cars passing the finish-line. I had a break-beam sensor to do this, it didn’t seen too reliable and then a wire broke during the workshop.

Code

Notes

This is the first time I used micro:bit controller boards. They’re great. Really practical feature set – that 5x5 LED grid and peer-to-peer radio in particular – backed by a wealth of teaching materials and stand-alone projects. Drag-and-drop blocks in a webpage for those new to programming, and python and the mu editor for those needing something more. And they’re cheap.

Two things caught me out. There is no breakout-board for the micro:bit that interfaces 3.3v and 5v. NeoPixel-like LED strips for instance need 5v, so a NeoPixel controller micro:bit needs both a power regulator in and a line driver back out. I hacked these onto a bread:bit breakout board, but to be robust and repeatable this really should be built into a PCB like that. (The controller board I made for Tekton is that on steriods, for the Raspberry Pi; it’s thanks to making those that I had the line driver chips lying around/).

The other thing is that sometimes the race would finish straight after starting, or after the finish state pass straight through waiting-for-player into countdown. The problem is the radio module has a queue of incoming messages, which meant stale or even dropped messages. So I wrote a only-care-about-the-latest wrapper class: radiolatest.py on GitHub

Diary entries

contains art » cardboard wipeout

to watchet, for the first of my two workshops getting teenagers to do creative-tech stuff. twee for me, but west somerset has the lowest social mobility in the whole of the UK and watchet is the most deprived ward in the district. so kinda serious.

the brief was gaming, and one idea led to wipeout-with-cardboard. one shipping container, two dirt-cheap radio-controlled cars and a village’s worth of post-christmas cardboard later, we had a track. admittedly more cardboard than tech at the moment, but this route is surely more engaging than coding 101.

aaaand… wipeout? i challenge anyone to find a better cultural artefact from 1996 than the opening sequence of wipeout 2097: the designers republic, future sound of london, it’s a coming together of all the arts.

contains art » cardboard wipeout

with the track made, time to add the digital magic and make it a game.

first up: LED strips with an extra wire… a programmable wire. and here is a micro:bit, essentially the guts of a phone made so we can control and play with things. with a bit of drag-and-drop in a web browser, we can make patterns down the strip and animate them.

but we need two strips, with a controller each, to go round our track. so how to animate them together? the micro:bit has radio, they can talk to each other and say “now!”. this is also how we’re going to make the whole game work, with more of these boards talking to each other.

photo credit: jon @ contains art

contains art » cardboard wipeout

lights programmed with a countdown and chase animation i’d made the day before, onto the next task: fit them round the track.

contains art » cardboard wipeout

track hacked, onto task three: the car.

with micro:bit in there, parasitising it’s power off two of the three car batteries, we could disable the motor until the go! of the countdown, have different team logos lit up on the roof, send accellerometer data back to a computer to make futuristic driving sounds… or, most simply, give us a button to start the countdown. feels right having it on the car.

with the limited time, this is actually one i made earlier; the removable roof and fit of the micro:bit was a bit of a gift. within the workshop, we experimented with fitting cameras to the back-up car…

contains art » cardboard wipeout

so how does it look? and how does it look with a computer-driving-game first-person-view!? could you stream that camera feed to a phone hanging in front of someone’s eyes?

now i know that wifi streaming from a go-pro isn’t going have the low-latency required for actually driving it, but that’s just a spur to research what might… fpv racing drones seems to have this solved.

bonus: this photo was taken by one of the teenagers. it’s a great one.

contains art » cardboard wipeout

the brief was computer game. so, let’s make this thing an immersive experience. you enter the container, the ‘press play to start’ message is flashing, music booming…

with a micro:bit – and it’s radio-link to the track and car – connected to a laptop, a quick bit of patching i’d done the day before got some videos and coundown sounds playing in response to the “wait, 3, 2, 1, start, finish, wait” coming down the USB cable. add projector and PA, and boom!

we’d done it. ten teenagers, ten hours. quite the achievement, and time enough to play with it!

contains art » cardboard wipeout

…and did i have fun? sheesh!

photo credit: jon @ contains art

watershed » cardboard mario kart

i went to dorkbot bristol, and good things happened. one of which came from a producer from the watershed’s pervasive media studio standing up and saying “does anyone have a creative tech workshop? i’m looking to do something with families this easter.”

i do, said so, and lo: here i am hacking a fresh set of argos’s finest cheapest radio control cars. two notches later, it’s as if the designers of the toy meant for the micro:bit board to go here.

the only problem is that staff at watershed figured that while wipeout might be where the idea of the workshop came from, mario kart was the better hook to sell the idea to the public. they are of course right, and from the point of view of the workshop, they are identical games: tracks with power ups and downs.

watershed » cardboard mario kart

when i dreamt up cardboard wipeout, it was for a two-day, 10 hour slot. it was appropriate to go “here’s your empty shipping container, let’s figure out how to fill it”. but a three-hour workshop is quite different, and so: blank canvas, like before? or… and if “or”, then what? the decision was to prime the space with a section of track: a figure-of-eight is a classic use of limited space, it gets you a bridge, it makes you consider how walls might work, and is a good demo for efficient use of a cardboard box. well, three. quite elegant, i think.

watershed » cardboard mario kart

micro:bits come loaded with a demo program that’s great for taking them out of their retail box, plugging in a battery and passing them around the group.

but later, in smaller break-out sessions, the question becomes: we’ve seen what the people who make these boards make it do, but that’s not what we need for our game. how do we make it do what we want it to do.

this 8-14 year old workshop skewed younger both days, so a lot of the wonder was the kids simply selecting an icon in scratch on my computer, and then seeing that light up on the board’s 5x5 LED matrix.

but also, like here, sometimes the wonder was seeing something i’d prepared earlier, and grokking a piece of the “grown up” code that animated the LED strips.

original photo credit: shamil ahmed

watershed » cardboard mario kart

making the micro:bits do what we wanted was half of the “creative tech”, as they need to be part of our physical game. and with me, “let’s hook them up to the track” quickly turns to some fetishising the clicks of different switches. any excuse to quote kenneth grange’s small pleasures.

original photo credit: shamil ahmed

watershed » cardboard mario kart

the three-hour format was to run twice. and here’s the first day’s lot, racing their track.

(well, half of them are out of shot, but you get the idea)

original photo credit: shamil ahmed

watershed » cardboard mario kart

and here’s the second day’s lot, making their track. so different!

watershed » cardboard mario kart

having named one of the group challenges as “the banana” – after mario kart’s well-known banana that can spin you out – it was a happy moment to see tbe carboard + microswitch engineering had been appropriately set-dressed.

watershed » cardboard mario kart

thanks to tony for making this happen, and ably facilitating on both days. amazing feedback from the families throughout, to the point of asking if i could do it in their schools. i’ll take that as a win, and… yes, maybe?

watershed » cardboard mario kart

love the championship cup that came out of the first day. that’s either a very canny child, or the hand of a parent to e.g. find that dragon on some cardboard and line it up behind.

watershed » cardboard mario kart

tony, the producer, kept the track up for the next day’s monthly first friday networking drinks. that gave me a chance to try my my kids’ rc car, which was… quite something. suffice to say, the £75 UDIRC car demolishes the track, scrambling up the slopes and jumping clear off the bridge. i reckon we could do a loop-the-loop with it.

watershed » cardboard mario kart

martin had also worked a little magic, digging out some stage lights and delivering on our parting conversation from the day before:

toby – “the gopro camera will stream over wifi, but the latency is too slow to drive the car using it. the fpv drone racers must have a modern solution for this, but back in the day, those lipstick analogue spy cams would be perfect for this”
martin – “hmm… i wonder… let me go rummage”

dorkbot / wipeout

given the opportunity had come about via dorkbot, only felt right to present back what i’d been up to. a good “who is this toby”, as much as anything else.