You should upgrade your Flash Player. If you are sure you have at least version 8 of the Flash Player, you may bypass the detection
A design for track-based toy racing cars that offers infinate expandability and promotes creativity and innovation in children. Four leading art/design/engineering universties were asked by Mattel to take part in a competition to re-examine the Hotwheels brand and consider future directions in the design of its toys. Although extreemly popular, the line is suffering as a result of a shift in childrens’ interest towards video games. The challenge was to combine established play patterns with new initiatives in interaction design and computation that would again capture children’s attention. The Lineriders car is a 1:43 scale toy car equipped with an array of sensors that allow it to follow lines drawn on the floor. In addition, a child can annotate the track with symbols that are understood optically by the car, altering its driving pattern (eg. speeding up for a jump, slowing down or preparing for an oncoming obstacle or sharp turn).
"€śIt seemed to me that the fundamental shortcoming in so many of todays toys is their limited scope for extendibility and creativity; something that only a few products (namely Lego) have successfully combatted. Staying within the remit of toy cars and tracks, I sought to open up the track racing system to allow for more open ended play patterns and creative input on the part of the child." The beauty in the system lies in the iterative design process the child goes through in order to drive his/her car to the limits of its capability. The construction phase is an integral but often overlooked phase of the play experience, and too many overly prescriptive toys leave little room for innovation here. In contrast the Lineriders’ play experience is open ended, bringing together the worlds of scalextrix and micro-RC cars in a way that actively encourages children to experiment with household objects and their surroundings. The Lineriders concept was presented to Mattel in Los Angeles in 2005 as one of nine winning entries in the competition, to much acclaim. The project has since taken a shift into a more virtual space. In 2005 as part of the Royal College of Art Show, the Lineriders concept was set up as an interactive projected installation where participants could draw with markers on a specially constructed infrared surface. Three dimensional cars, projected on the same surface, would follow these lines, colliding and shifting behaviour according to the visual annotation language.
