Interval
A wall of lit targets for the places people are already standing still.
Working title. This one does not have its final name yet — it grew out of the bench rig the other two installations were designed on. Candidates so far: Interval, Dwell, Standby.
At a glance
- Format
- Wall-mounted panel of lit, sensor-backed targets
- Interaction
- Hit the lit target, it moves. Reaction time, sequences, two-player
- Session length
- Built around 30 seconds to 4 minutes — the length of a wait
- Sensing
- Same camera-free sensing as the outdoor work
- Power
- Single mains feed. No groundwork, no network cabling required
- Siting
- Indoor, on a wall, supervised or semi-supervised
Who it is for
- Station and transit operators with platforms and concourses full of waiting
- Sports facilities wanting a warm-up station that needs no staff
- Physio, clubs and schools measuring and training reaction time
- Anywhere with a blank wall and a queue in front of it
Where it fits
Station platforms and concourses
A round is short enough to abandon the moment the train arrives.
Sports halls and clubs
A warm-up and reflex station that needs no coach standing over it.
Physio and rehab
Reaction and reach, with a number at the end that can be tracked over weeks.
Schools and youth centres
Something to do in a corridor that is not a phone, in the gap between lessons.
Offices and workplaces
A thirty-second break that gets people out of a chair.
Where it is the wrong call. Outdoors, or anywhere completely unsupervised. The outdoor work is built to survive a beach; this is not that, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to a broken panel.
Where it came from
Every LightMoves installation hangs on the same question: when a person moves, what should the light do, and how fast?
That is cheap to answer on a bench and expensive to answer on a beach. So it got answered on a bench — a panel of lit targets wired to the same class of sensors and drivers the outdoor installations use, built purely to tune the interaction before committing it to an enclosure.
Then people kept playing with it. Not to test it — just because it was there and it was fun. That is the whole product thesis, and it was an accident.
The case for putting it where people wait
The average wait for a train is a few minutes of standing still looking at a phone. It is dead time, and there is an enormous amount of it: every platform, every day, in every station in the country.
A reaction panel fits that gap exactly:
- A round is abandonable. Thirty seconds to a few minutes, and walking away mid-game costs nothing. Anything that demands a full session is wrong for a platform.
- It needs nothing from you. No kit, no changing room, no app, no account. You are wearing a coat and holding a bag, and it still works.
- It reads in one second. A lit target and a hand. Nobody needs a sign, and nobody has to be shown by staff.
- It works alone or against someone. One person killing time, or two people who now have a reason to talk to each other.
The same argument holds anywhere there is standing around with a wall next to it — a sports hall before practice starts, a physio waiting room, a school corridor between lessons.
What it has to get right
The bench rig exists to answer exactly the things you cannot judge from a specification:
- Latency. Feedback that arrives 200 ms late feels broken even when every component is working correctly. You find that threshold by playing with it, not by reading a datasheet.
- Difficulty. Too easy is boring, too hard is humiliating, and both drive people away from a public installation within one round.
- Legibility. Whether someone walking past understands what to do without a sign, an instruction or a member of staff.
What is proven and what is not
Proven: the interaction, the timing, the sensing. The panel has been played with by enough people, for long enough, to know the game is right and the response feels immediate.
Not yet built: the product. The enclosure, the mounting, and the vandal- and cleaning-resistance a public indoor space demands — a station concourse gets pressure-washed, leaned on, hit harder than anyone intends, and occasionally attacked. None of that is exotic engineering, but none of it exists yet either.
That work is scoped and ready to start. What would make it real is a site to build it around — a station, a hall, a club willing to host the first one.