Spot The Bin is an augmented reality game developed by a small team of students from Edinburgh University as a part of the university innovative learning week Hackathon of 2014. It allows the players to play a real-life version of the motorcycle game presented in the movie Tron (1982) throughout the city of Edinburgh. The purpose of the game is to increase people's awareness of various landmarks and places of interest within Edinburgh.
How does it work?
People that wish to play the game can create their own network of nodes via the Spot The Bin website. You can select particular categories of places, depending on your preference (what types of places do you want to get to know better). Categories range from Parks and Gardens or Monuments all the way to Museums and Galleries or even Sports and Recreational facilities. The game turns these places of interest into nodes which the players have to visit (and thus they get to know them). Once a game is created through the website, the players can log in and play through a smartphone application, while making their way through the city.
Names of all landmarks and their GPS locations were taken from the datasets provided to us by the Edinburgh City Council. The .csv files can be found here.
Why is it called Spot The Bin?
The initial idea was to use rubbish bins as the nodes, as they form a dense enough grid of nodes to cover the entire city, yet not too dense (such as it would be if all categories were used). Hence the name "Spot The Bin". Once we however decided to use all categories anyway and allow players to choose which ones they wish to use, the name "Spot The Bin" was already implemented and given to the judges as the name of our project. It stuck to the very end.
- Link to the main website (the part I worked on) as it was presented to the judges at the end of the Hackathon: Spot The Bin. (The web may be slow, since it is run on a slow, yet free heroku scheme)
- Link to a git repository containing the code: Repository
- Link to a git repository containing the smartphone application: Repository
The smartphone application is not it available on the website itself. The reason we decided not to put the smartphone application onto the website is because the game is not fully completed. We were allowed to work on it only for the four days and even though we do have a working version, I would refer to it as a rough draft.
For testing purposes, however, there is a tab labelled "Send Data" on the website. This tab allows you to enter data about your location directly, without having to actually walk around Edinburgh to test it. (The game name, game password, player name and password have to be sent along with the GPS coordinates every time in order to identify the player and the game he is playing)
All links from the CV