My idea for a wearable tech project is a mobile game with a wearable component and plushies. The intent of this project is to create a game with wearable tech with dirt-cheap wearable tech components that can be given away practically for free.

The main summary of the game is that users find and collect animals in their game by going to locations with the plushies and scanning their pendants against the plushie’s body to unlock that animal in their game.

This idea can be broken down into 3 components, each of which is considered a milestone:

1. The Mobile App
   1. The game itself will be free-to-download and will not require any wearable tech (although, most of the fun comes in owning the subsequent wearable tech products). The game features the user having a collection of pets which they send on missions throughout the day. Each mission lasts a few hours, the player receives updates on what their pet is doing (“playing in a puddle, swinging across a rickity bridge, etc.), and once the pet completes their mission they earn some experience points and some small in-game reward (an apple, a trinket, etc.).
2. The Animal Pendants
   1. Animal Pendants are wearable components of the game. Each pendant holds within it an RFID/NFC tag which contains a unique scannable number associated with its owner. The pendant is used to collect more animals. Because the hardware within the pendant is cheap ($1-2), small (around 1cm), and flexible, pendants can resemble anything ranging from necklaces to earrings to clip-on gadgets. Animal pendants are mainly stylized based on the animal designs and symbols created for the game.
3. The Animal Plushies
   1. The animal plushies are stuffed animals that resemble animals that can be found in the game. Each of these animals has a RaspberryPI 0 W, an RFID/NFC reader/writer, and a battery within it. When a player scans their pendant against a plushie, they receive that animal in their game and can use that animal for adventuring in the gameplay. Each animal plushie costs around $15 in hardware (excluding cost of fabric/stuffing), and the intent is to market these towards small businesses, museums, libraries and other areas to draw in crowds.

Below are some mockups for the game’s UI and some ideas for the plushie designs. The two plushie ideas that people seemed to really like were a Sheep and an Otter, although close runner-ups were a Corgi and “A Loaf Of Cat”

I feel fairly confident in building the mobile app, and feel as though the hardware components will be rather easy to setup once I have one working model.

I feel like I could use some improvement in setting up the networking aspect of this, as well as the plushie designs.