Rope Ties

Passion Fruit

A cooperative jump rope game helps international students build friendships.

RopeTie is a digital rope skipping group exercise that allows multiple people to jump together. It is a digital virtual game designed to allow users to break the space to participate in rope skipping in the near future era, and it can also be combined with other high technologies such as metaverse technology to allow users to jump rope with other users in the virtual world to strengthen each other social connections.
When you feel lonely and anxious, when you want to muster up the courage to make new friends, when you lack opportunities to socialize with others, and find it difficult to integrate into the new life. You can jump with RopeTie anytime anywhere. Our project is to create social opportunities for users and strengthen social connections between strangers. The device is a combination of Unity and Arduino. Users connect to each other through the Uno controller. Use the acceleration sensor to control the handle to swing the skipping rope and detect the jumping state of the jumper to complete the game. The jumper can observe the motion state of the rope to calculate his own jumping time through the monitor.
We hope that RopeTie will become a new movement in the future, which can connect young people in the world, transcend space, transcend time, and cross cultures to create a new social experience in the near future. It can brand new social networking experience to our users.

Equipment Assembly process Unity sensors Two sensors Equipment components User_Testing1 User_Testing2 Project Interaction Testing Manipulation equipment Drop rope mode Conceptual Model Scenario building and iteration C# Scenario building and iteration2 C#_2

Technical Description

To achieve the hardware requirement, the physical prototype need to be able to identify users' movement and communicate with virtual environment to send user's physical body posture.
Advantage: Only one module of hardware need to prepper for different user roles, high interference immunity, low system complexity, Scalable. Scalable.
Disadvantage: Significant sensor noise, all users need hold hardware in hand, higher cost, communication limitations (connect with cable)

Prototype

Physical Components:
  • Arduino UNO in acrylic case with a small breadboard stick on it.
  • A MPU-6050 sensor, LED role indicators and a calibration button secured on breadboard.
  • Arduino will communicate with virtual environment with a 3m USB-B cable.
    • Digital components:
  • Receive and process data from multiple Arduino
  • Observe the skipper is jumped up or landed with acceleration data and count jumps.
  • Represent the rope turner's hand movement in virtual environment.
  • Visually guide rope turner to swing the rope in desired speed.

    • Technical issues

    We encounter several hardware issues in our design, some of which we managed to solve, while others were accidentally avoided. For example, the disconnection between Arduinos and the virtual environment. This issue occurred due to the cables connecting them together was not securely attached during skipping. We tried using tape to secure it, however, the tape tended to fall apart from the cable. We also attempted to find a suitable casing as protection. The increasing weight of the device could have negatively affected the skipping experience. In the end, we decided to display it in its original form.

    Future plan:

    Physical Components:
    In the future, we plan to upgrade the grips to wireless mode and enable pairing for remote online jump rope mode.
    Digital components:
    We would like to implement that skip rope games can only be start when both rope turners are turning at the same speed. When both players are not turning the rope at the same time, the game ends and the rope turning stops.