Play The House – Gamification of a building.
Sound artist Håkan Lidbo has teamed up with students from Royal School of Technology and Science and created an interface that transforms a big building into an online computer game. Go to playthehouse.com and play against other people online.
The technology is based on Philips Hue, the new wifi LED lightbulb. A number of Hue lights are arranged in the windows so that each one of them represents a pixel in the game. The whole building becomes a real-time interface via a camera stream from a nearby building.
The first building to be transformed with Playthehouse is NOD, hosting some of the most innovative tech companies in the Stockholm region, built by Atrium & Ljungberg. NOD is officially opened October 2nd and the same day Playthehouse starts.
Each evening and night, 6 pm to 6 am CET (when it’s dark enough to see the lights in the windows) anyone can go to http://playthehouse.com, cue up to be coupled with another player. You play the classic code-game Mastermind where both players are coders and decoders.
When a small board game is being blown up in this size, and you realize how easily it’s done, you wonder if architects all over the world shouldn’t consider making their houses look more like games.
This is not the first time a building gets animations with lights, but these installations are normally very expensive and complicated. Playthehouse is set up in a few hours and taken down even faster, then it can move on to the next building that needs to be gamified.
Visit playthehouse.com and play Mastermind in mega-format.