Multi-threaded banjo dinosaur knitting adventure 2d extreme!!!

A fabric hacking genius, a professional circuit board modifier and a natural born coder took it upon themselves to adjust an old fashioned Brother knitting machine and make it into a 2d game.

Developed at the ikSentric Dev Camp 2010 at Mediamatic, this ingenious construction, inspired by the famous Bayeux tapestry, has been a combined effort by Fabienne Serriere, Travis Goodspeed and me.

A knitting machine...?

Users of the installation start their interaction by swiping their ikTag past a RFID-reader. Two players at a time are then invited to create a 2d-avatar on the ikCam interface which they will then use to play a game against each other. The team designed a river raid game especially for the installation. The two players will then compete with one another. The player that survives the longest wins eternal fame by being knit in the by a Brother knitting machine Tapisserie de Bayeux inspired carpet.

To make the installation work we first had to thoroughly study the knitting machine. Because the machine was running on extremely outdated firmware the step of making a link to the ikCam terminals meant building custom electronics to be able to interface with it. To give the installation a social and competitive element, we hackers decided to write our own game featuring angry dinosaurs and flying banjo's.

Get the source code

svn checkout svn://svn.mediamatic.nl/devcamps/camp10/banjo

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Created on 27 Kasım 2010 13:16, last modified on 7 Eylül 2011 16:14.

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