ScuttleBot Mayhem! Physical Game

Save the Ship Before the Kraken Awakes! The ship is lost at sea and fires and leaks are breaking out all over the deck. From the Virtual Control Zone you can control the movements of your ScuttleBots to repair the damage and insure the safe delivery of crates full of essential supplies.

Scuttlebot Mayhem! is an immersive game experience for people to play together in a large space. The virtual world can be projected on one large wall or on a floor and it uses industrial laser scanners (SICKs) to track the movements of participants so they can control the robots on the virtual ship. Participants need to cooperate to save the ship from sinking.

A combo of Battleships and Twister!
When players see a fire breakout on the deck, they rush to the matching coordinates in the virtual control zone (marked out on the floor)… triggering the response of a ScuttleBot. The more players in the control zone the more difficult the game becomes and groups will need to cooperate… resulting in hilarious shenanigans.

This project is an experiment in multi-user interaction in public spaces. This game requires physical interaction and exertion and is a lot of fun. Our main objectives were to:

• activate un-used spaces and transform them into memorable zones of activity
• be multi-user capable so that both groups of friends and strangers could enjoy the co-operative experience
• resolve how novel interaction could occur in real-time in large spaces
• demonstrate how multiple technologies that do not normally get used together can be integrated through a game engine
• encourage interaction through spectacle, co-operation and competition in public spaces

In 2017, this work has been installed in two public sites:

• Robotronica Festival – 22,000 people came along to the Robotronica Festival in 2017. This provided a perfect opportunity for the research and creative team to test the projects’ capacity for extremely high participant numbers and constant engagement for up to 8 hours at a time.
• Wintergarden Shopping Complex (Queen Street Mall, Brisbane) – Our initial partners on this project funded the team to make the first interaction that was installed in a busy retail complex in the CBD of Brisbane. The managers of the Wintergarden complex were interested in how such an experience could bring people into low traffic retail areas to increase activity and engagement.