Title	RAMPED
Brand	RHINOFLY IN COLLABORATION WITH UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES UTRECHT
Product/Service	THE INTERACTIVE SKATEPARK RAMPED: ANALOG SKATEBOARDING, AUGMENTED WITH DIGITAL E
Category	A01. Innovation
Entrant Company	RHINOFLY Utrecht, THE NETHERLANDS
Advertising Agency	RHINOFLY Utrecht, THE NETHERLANDS

Name	Company	Position
Ronald Van Schaik	Rhinofly	Owner
Rob Maijers	University Of Applied Sciences Utrecht	Interim Coordinator
Khalid El Khouani	Rhinofly	Creative
Johan Haneveld	Rhinofly	Creative Developer
Paul Brekelmans	Rhinofly	Technologist
Bas Gezelle	Rhinofly	Creative Strategist
Gerben Van Heijningen	Rhinofly	Interactive Producer
Hugo Van De Hoef	Rhinofly	Art Director
Nicky Correljé	Rhinofly	Creative
Mira Deva	Rhinofly	Journalist
5 Studentteams	University Of Applied Sciences Utrecht	Concepting And Prototyping

The Brief

For the new generation, gaming is second nature. Gamification is part of their life. Typical about gaming in the traditional way is that gamers are passive in the real world and active in the virtual world. We turned this principle around and placed the player in a physical gaming environment. By challenging them with the impulses they are familiair with we get them to exercise in an active way. As an interactive agency we wanted to find out what would happen if we combined the physical gameplay of skateboarding with elements of virtual gaming. And by doing so learn which new possibilites the combination of online and offline interactivity can bring us for the future. The product - an interactive skatepark - is not the most important goal of this project. It’s the experimental journey toward the destination that is really valuable for us. By experimenting with multidisciplinary teams on this new playground we explore the boundaries of interactivity, and define new ones. This project is a safe haven in which we can fail in a very valuable way: we learn to understand the future.

Before we started building we took quite some time to really understand the target audience, their habits, their culture and their gameplay. This research gave us the insight that the way skateboarding is being “played” depends on different variables: age, motivation, expert level, character, gaming archetype. Based on these insights we developed five different interactive objects. Each of the skateboarding games serves a dormant need which the skateboarder wasn’t even aware of, and connects with their game-minded being in a very natural way. Because of the variety of concepts we used a broad range of different technologies. For instance, to track the skateboarder in the Monstergame we used modified webcams and infrared-technology, in the multiplayer game Raze we used WII-controllers. The position of the skateboarder in Gain Your Ground was tracked by bluetooth signals in combination with Arduino-enabled bracelets. Tricks on the interactive skateboard are being detected by gyroscope and compass, the grind skills on the box are detected by infrared- and lightsensors. To tie this together we used HTML/JS, PHP, Websockets, Java, Arduino/C++, Node js, Actionscript, C, .net and CSS. We worked in multidisciplinairy teams. Teammembers are creatives and technologists, dreamers and nerds, students of the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht and experienced employees of Rhinofly. The story of the experimental journey of this remarkable mixture of people is captured in a documentary which will be released this fall. Every step of the 6 month project was published on the Tumblr-powered website www.ramped.nl. Ramped is privately funded by Rhinofly. A small price to pay for tons of new perspectives, new visions, new ideas and the belief that if we create chemistry between people, we can make magic as a collective.

The interactive skatepark is a unique innovative gamechanger for skateboarding. It reveals a new way in how sports are perceived and experienced. The first demos made clear that the target audience is excited and eager to play more and more. This confirms our gut feeling that the game-minded new generation wants to be challenged in a way they are familliar with. This evolution of the physical gameplay of skateboarding makes perfect sense. Although the game Raze will be a shippable product in december 2014, the concept and spirit of Ramped will always be in beta. After all, we started this journey to explore, and since we only discovered just a little of the enormous amount of possibilities, we are not finished yet. We believe that the role of interactive agencies should be more than to seduce customers to buy more products. The mindset and powerful combination of strategy, creativity and technology adds value to a lot more subjects than commerce. Besides that we are convinced that we should not just rely on the words of gurus, books or conventions in our industry. We have to discover our own truth by getting our hands dirty and burning our fingers.