The iKWiN project was developed by Simon Claessen, Axel Roest and Mathias Forbach, in one week at the Mediamatic RFID Hackerscamp 08, before the PICNIC08 Conference. You have a desk where you put your ikTag and your challenger does the same. You go onto the lift, press the red buttons and then the elevators go up. The higher you are ranked on google, the higher you go. At the end, if the result is not clear, the arrow shows who wins,
Technical
The project uses a MacBook Pro as master controller, with three Arduino's for connecting to the outside world. Two SonMicro USB RFID readers are connected to the Mac to read the ik tags.
Because of bad experience with serial drivers and ruby, and an ephemeral time frame, a design decision was made to write the Mac control program in perl. Proven technology. It calls various sub-programs in other languages, part of Mediamatic's RFID and OSC tools, to connect to the readers and anymeta db.
Thanks to Erik Borra for the PHP screen scraping of Google, easier than using the API.
More links
Team
Axel Roest, Simon Claessen and Mathias Forbach, with help from Bas Pijls.