Video still for Flypad Flypad augmented video footageFlypad promotional imageFlypad installation at The PublicFlypad installation at The Public

Flypad is a site specific work for The Public Gallery in West Bromwich, using augmented reality to create a thrilling, collaborative experience that combines game play with interaction, joyful goofing about with a visceral sense of the blur between real and virtual space.

Augmented video at The Public

The work has 11 terminals arranged around the central atrium of the gallery. Each is equipped with a monitor, a motorised pan-tilt camera and a footpad interface in the floor.
Visitors create avatars which they’re able to fly around the atrium using the footpad. The camera tracks their position as they fly; crashing into other avatars, learning new moves and collaborating together to attain perfect grace.

By holding on to other avatars, visitors can stay in the air for longer, mutating with the avatars they hold on to. As the game progresses, visitors become hybridised: from a group of individual and separate bodies emerges a social body in which everyone’s form and identity is partly moulded by those around them.

Flypad can be seen in THEpUBLIC, West Bromich.


Flypad has been developed in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham and Action Time Vision.

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