Mind Tribe: Gaming on the sidewalk (and getting ogled)

Mind Tribe, a technologically-oriented engineering company, self-professedly dreams great things in the future: their headquarters will be composed of “celebration bricks”, which, depending on your expression, posture, gait, and temperature, will challenge and/or celebrate you as you walk alongside the office. But that’s still the future. Not quite to this degree of engineering genius, they are making baby steps toward this dream with a plasma television screen in their front window which, in bright reds, fiery oranges, and Joanna Chao’s clouds/eerily happy gummy bears, proclaims “Play here! …With your cell phone.”

That’s right, MindTribe has ingeniously utilized phone-to-television connectivity, which allows any random passerby with a cell phone to play a Tetris-like game, super-sized, on the sidewalk. In laymen’s terms, when their unit is approached by anyone with a cell phone, that passerby is prompted to dial a number, whose signal—through many wired and wireless communications—is sent to the Mind Tribe computer which is attached to the television. From here, the player is faced with a welcome screen, and the fun begins. For those who are interested in the actual science of all this, there is an explanation at the website, along with a fun, ultra-simplified diagram.

The icing on the cake? The player can add a name, comment, and picture to be immortalized at the games section of the Mind Tribe website . And who would deny such Internet fame, even if the photo is just of your torso?

If you’re in the area, check out the coolest new thing that takes a gamer out of his or her basement/cave- dwelling element. 119 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA.