The iHřiště project aims to provide operators of playgrounds, workout areas, nature trails, castles or schools with a platform to enhance the experience with elements of the digital world. We had to come up with a way to teach a purely "off-line" location to communicate with a mobile phone, and subsequently the added value of connecting such a modernized location with the virtual world. The basic requirements were simplicity of implementation, reusability of the individual parts of the system and as little maintenance as possible.
Take your phone or tablet, go to the camera app and take a picture of the QR code and it will direct you to download the app.
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They are placed on the pitch to cover as much area as possible and thus make the most of the space. The beacons continuously transmit a weak signal that can be picked up by mobile phones with the iPitch app installed. Simply going from point to point would be quite boring, so we've come up with lots of activities that thematically fit into each installation.
So users of all ages can search for virtual treasure on the playground, play a quiz game, walk a nature trail or even work out with the help of the app.
We've also added the ability to compete with other app users in each activity and place on a virtual leaderboard!
The result of our work is a system consisting of a back-end with an information system and a mobile application.
Back-end
We wrote the back-end in PHP - we used our internal framework built as a superstructure over the Nette PHP framework. Thanks to the fact that our framework is used almost exclusively for the creation of information systems, which we approach modularly, we were able to use already finished pieces of code and thus significantly reduce the implementation time and thus the cost for the client.
Mobile applications
We built the mobile app using the React Native framework, which allows us to maintain support for both Android and iOS while radically reducing the time required to maintain the mobile app. During the development process we used our good knowledge of working with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) communication protocol.
Final implementation
The entire system is then connected via a REST API and is built to be as easy as possible to extend to meet the exact needs of clients. Therefore, it's no problem for us to add even a tailor-made activity and adding a new course is a matter of a few clicks in the administration. The number of supported playgrounds is increasing every week - in fact, you can see the currently supported playgrounds a little further down the map.
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