This is one of those rare gigs that can convince you you’ve made the right career choice. We were approached by Peddle Thorpe Architects to create something for Banyule City Council’s Greensborough Aquatic Centre in Melbourne. Working together with the talented Dan Burke at Spinifex we came up with a great concept.

Water sprays with built in pressure sensors are embedded in the floor and connected with patterns of LED lights that behave like water pipes. Kids can jump on a sensor and see it animate out to the next one before it erupts. If another kid then jumps on this one the water is redirected elsewhere. In addition to the ground sprays we have other products from Waterplay such as water cannons that kids can charge up by redirecting water into them and then spray their friends! Little did we know that in the first version of the floor plan we had placed the cannons in between the 10 year old section and the beach to the 3 year old toddler pool. We were informed by one of the council members that we needed to move them as “It’d be like Gallipoli, mate!”.

Figuring out how to demo the gameplay to client whilst in dev was a little tricky, until the epiphany of using a multi touch table and finger shorts:

Unfortunately, due to an issue with the trench design the electronics have been flooded! The trenches are currently being better water proofed and the lights replaced. Watch this space for updates!

The application is built using OpenFrameworks. It uses Art-net to talk to the lights (I have made this code available on github) and TCP to talk to spray control system.