Taking the "tag" game to a whole new level!

After exploring several ideas, we decided to design a special version of the "tag" game that could benefit from wireless mobile devices.

In this special version of the tag game there would be 2 teams (at least) that have different colors. Let's say that we have team Red and team Blue. Red kids go after blue kids to try to "turn" them red and viceversa. When a blue kid touches a red kid, the red kid "turns" into a blue kid and now has to go after more red kids to turn them blue.
So, we think that technology can enable this game because we can give visual feedback on the color team where a kid belongs at a specific moment, in other words, color teams could be identifiable.

Thinking on specifying the requirements that we need to fulfil to build the technology necessary to play this game, we came up with this list:

• Each kid should be identifiable with a color. Some wearable device should give continuous feedback on the color team the kid belongs at a specific moment.
• The wearable device that the kid uses should be able to "remember" and also change the color team of the kid.
• The interaction between kids should be touching an easy to reach part of the body of a playmate (shoulder, arm or back). When a kid A touches a kid B, the color of A should be transferred to B.

So what technology can we use to do this? We had several model ideas for a platform al around using SunSPOTs. SunSPOTs can communicate easily with each other and are small enough to carry in some sort of armband. They also have RGB LEDs and a little memory where we can store our program and also "remember" the current color team of the kid.
The main problem we needed to resolve was: how do we transfer the color from one kid to the other when they touch?

The design that we chose to solve this includes two wearable devices:

• An armband carrying the SunSPOT with an RFID reader and LEDs displaying the current color team of the kid
• A "handband" with an RFID tag

Let's say that we have the kid A with color red, and kid B with color blue and we have this sequence:

1. A touches with the handband the arm of B with the armband
2. The sunSPOT in the armband reads the RFID tag in the handband. The RFID tag holds the address of the sunSPOT of A
3. The sunSPOT of B communicates with the sunSPOT A to ask him for the color or A.
4. sunSPOT A responds to sunSPOT B the color of A
5. sunSPOT B changes its color from blue to red. 

This implies that before starting the game there are armbands and handbands that correspond with each other, because the RFID tags have to already store the address of their corresponding sunSPOTs.

Now we have to start building the platform!