City tattoo | yu-zhang

"City Tattoo"

1st prize of DDI 2016 Hackathon

Team Project

Team: Yu Zhang, Zhao Ma, Guo Zhang

2016

"City Tattoo" is the 1st prize winner project of the 2-day "Make Me++" Hackathon during Design Driven Innovation 2018 Conference held at MIT Media Lab.

Sponsored by PUMA, one of the biggest athletic and casual footwear, apparel and accessories companies, the hackathon themed "Urban Fitness" and asked attended teams to develop conceptual wearable devices project to improving the urban lives of people in the future city.

Our team developed a system that allowed users to draw patterns using their walking or running trace, either individually or collectively. They can also run the pattern in a designated way or in an exploratory way. We also manufactured a prototype that can show tracks on users' sportswear using LEDs.

This project finally won the 1st prize among more than 15 teams and received a $4,000 awards.

After analysing several popular tracking mobile apps, we discovered the potential market for our concept and developed a basic pattern matching conceptual algorithms to map patterns onto city maps.

Project Presentation.

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We developed a script in Rhino/Grasshopper visual computing platform, to transform different patterns into the machine code for the LED matrix, which was later connected to an Android chip for the controlling.

For the hardware part, we hacked a T-shirt by adding LEDs on the front/back and using a conceptual ring to make dots connecting the app, thus avoid the unwanted trace during the running, so as to run the targeted pattern.

Awards.

Badge and ranking system was also designed to increase the adhesiveness and encourage users to explore the unexplored part of the city.

Collaborating mechanism was developed to allow several people to run a larger tattoo together, and syncing with their wearable device with different colours.