Playware Soccer – flexibility through modularity and layered multi-modal feedback

We developed the Playware Soccer game and tested this with more than 1,000 users during the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa in townships, orphanages for HIV/AIDS children, markets, FIFA fan parks, etc. The playware game is set up to motivate players to engage in training of technical soccer skills by receiving motivating, immediate feedback on the soccer playing on a modular interactive wall composed of modular interactive tiles that respond with coloured light, sound and scores on the players performance.

The flexibility of the system was designed for with the modular interactive tiles and the layered multi-modal feedback design, which together aimed at creating a system that could be setup and used by anybody anywhere within minutes. The modular interactive tiles can be viewed to provide hardware building blocks, and the layered multi-modal feedback design to provide feedback building blocks, and simple construction with these building blocks should give a high degree of flexibility for the designer and the user to create various set-ups and interaction possibilities in an easy manner.