By Rune Fogh
When playing we enter a special, therapeutical and enjoyable mental state that draws us away from our ordinary lives. Entertainment products have become better and better at getting its users to effi ciently enter into this state both mentally and physically. The project will continue this development and focus on understanding how to move users into a state of play through interaction with tangible products.
This project will work towards creating such an understanding through the development of the modular playware technology project, which, together with LEGO and Advance, uses intelligent hardware and software that stimulate playful activities in order to develop the intelligent LEGO brick of the future.
It will be the objective of this project to explore and implement a variety of game mechanics in the modular playware platform in a way that allows the player(s) to interact and manipulate with the game-play and customize it to their individual play-scenario. In addition, the project will work towards creating a new design methodology for evaluating user studies with regard to how well the product gets its player(s) into the state of play. This should be an important contribution to the research fi eld of entertainment products, as no such evaluation method exists today.
To be completed: 2015
Co-funded by the Danish Advanced Technology Foundation