Rhythm Rush

A motion-tracked dance game for concert queues that gets strangers interacting through play instead of small talk. Up to four players step onto marked spots and appear as low-poly characters on a big screen, dancing along with an on-screen guide. Everyone else in the queue can watch, join in or carry on past without losing their place.

Read Research Report Observation, interviews and experiments behind the idea.

Read Design Report Concept selection, co-design, testing and the final design.

Human Centred Design Concept 6 Months

Render of the Rhythm Rush queue space: a railed walkway leading to a curved screen showing four dancing characters

Developed with:

Aidan Ryder

Ikem Enebeli

Yousuf Shahabuddin

Amarie Fasoro

Research

We started at Outernet, an immersive space by Tottenham Court Road designed to get the public interacting. Visitors stayed an average of 41 seconds, nearly half were on their phones, and nobody spoke to anyone new. Street interviews with 21 people explained why; most wanted to connect but worried about intruding or looking like "a weirdo".

So we tried giving them a reason. Outside Imperial's library, we set up a table where passers-by could high-five us or have a quick chat, then swapped the chat for a two-player game, and interactions doubled. People who wouldn't interrupt a conversation crowded around the game and started talking without being asked.

Follow-up interviews and a survey pointed us to concert queues. They're full of bored strangers who already share an interest

Passers-by stopping at our table outside the library — Our table experiment outside Imperial’s library - ran by Aidan and Ikem

Solution

We tested three concepts with users. PrEmo emotion cards captured how each one would feel to come across in a queue, with friends and alone. And a Harris profile then scored the concepts on criteria like learnability and fit with the pace of a queue. Rhythm Rush scored highest, and its whole premise depends on tracking people's bodies reliably.

This is the body tracking we built for Rhythm Rush, which I've rebuilt to run on this site. MediaPipe places landmark points on your limbs and joins them into a skeleton that follows you in real time, which is how the game animated the characters and scored the dancers. I left out the characters and stage art to keep it lightweight, so what you see is just the tracking.