Remote Control People

Background

Collaborating with Blueboxx Creative; "C" venues at Edinburgh festival asked us to look at creating an entertaining outdoor space for their 2009 festival season.

The brief

The main requirement from the client was for it to be a maze. We wanted to create an exciting interactive space that would generate a 'buzz' around Edinburgh. We explored 'Retro' Gaming as a starting point, looking at 80's maze arcade games. The 'retro' feel influenced a lot of the look and feel of the concept.

People would enter teams of eight. 4 would be controllers, 4 would be controlled. Those being controlled would navigate through the maze via directions, such as 'left', 'right', 'forward' conveyed through headphones in the helmet. The controllers would press the button correlating with the direction they want to go in which triggered a sampled voice relayed wirelessly to the controlled persons headphone. The controlled person had a camera mounted in the top of the helmet giving a "Point-of-View" live feed back to the control console.