Trampoline Games

Problem Statement

Our goal is to:

harness the energy created from jumping on a trampoline,
design a game using the mechanics of a trampoline,
power the game played on the trampoline.

Background Research

We plan to start off with a game resembling the Simon game, being played by jumping on the four quadrants of a trampoline.

Make Your Own Pressure Sensor

One way to detect where the user is jumping would be with pressure sensors installed on the surface of the trampoline.

We are also looking into using (ultrasonic) distance sensors being placed underneath the trampoline as a possible way of measuring the quadrant being jumped on. Using either pressure sensors or distance sensors would require having four sensors and would only be able to measure where the user is jumping with some accuracy. If we plan to expand our system, and perhaps create a game which involves what the user does during each jump we will look into the use of other sensors such as the xbox KINECT, which uses a webcam-style sensor to detect human body movements. The Kinect may be an interesting option because it has built in voice and facial recognition, for users to continue a career-style gaming experience. It is also programmed to recognize human body motions specifically so for example if a game required some sort of predetermined motion on the trampoline such as a shape to make with the user's body, the Kinect would be ideal for recognizing such a shape or motion. Microsoft has also mentioned that they might bring the Kinect to PC officially by March, but until then, we have to research ways we can actually integrate such a highly capable sensor into our project. MIT for example has hacked the Kinect and has used it for web browsing, but adding something like this onto our game will require a lot of research and programming.

KINECT on Wikipedia