RFID and Parkour

Filed in archive Implementation on September 26, 2006

Theo Tveteras who is first year industrial design student at AHO has worked on a project called urban orienteering which is based on the experience with parkour. For those people who are not aware about what parkour is let me give you a brief introduction about it.

Parkour is a physical discipline of French Origin in which the participant - called a traceur attempts to pass obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible, using skills such as jumping, vaulting and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The obstacles can be anything in the environment, so parkour is often practiced in urban areas because of many suitable public structures, such as buildings, rails, and walls.

source: wikipedia

A system has been designed by him which enables users in setting up tracks in any freeform space. The system is composed of three portions- the base station which acts as the focal hub of the system where users would be able to set up timers, check the best lap time and store rest of the equipments. The second part is the roaming discs which are placed around the area and are equipped with an RFID reader/writer and the third part is the wearable clip that is worn by the traceur on his wrist, shoes or other part of the body.

Participants would have to find the best route through discs and set up timed competitions around the same route. In this case RFID strapped to the body or buildings would help in storing timing data which could be very well utilized in parkour. Certainly RFID would complement parkour which is an urban space thing.

Thnx Timo