Starting Point

Christiane is working on a framework of how to prototype and evaluate social protocols and society building methods in play and theatre context with (inter)active audiences. Markus is curious about playing around/hacking different technologies. A shared interest that we figured out is smartwatches as social devices.

For interesting group interactions with smartwatches as devices (that do not require mobile phones), it would be interesting to have them interconnected, being able to sense (the distance and more) of each other, to measure the carrier's body-information (heart-rate, movement-pattern) and to be able to function as a communication device (with each other e.g. to push and receive game elements or to receive global push notifications).

Here are the specifications of the hardware we need:

Artistic Research Questions

• how to organize subgroups (tribes) of an instant society in a way that their actions have meaningful impact and can be evaluated afterwards
• how to prototype new kinds of social protocols with intuitive instructions/means
• how to model a kind of “social sense” (to feel closeness and distance, to feel attention and aversion)
• how to model abstract resources (as time) in an intuitive way
• how to make the interface as intuitive as possible

Technological Research Questions

• reading sensor data
• build a network where the watches communicate with one another
• build a server which saves game state and communicates with the smartwatches

Equipment & Setup needed

Watches

• 2 x bangle.js *All the Espruinos!* edition
• 15 x bangle.js *standard* edition

(Since some months we are watching the following watch makers bangle.js. Unfortunately through the outbreak of Corona the supply chain of the makers is interrupted, so we do not know if we can receive the devices (that were promised not before March 2020) in time. We started looking for alternatives now.)

Network and Server

• a simple notebook which functions as a server
• bluetooth hubs and maybe wiFi access points