Mao Imaizumi
Marika Joyce Hashimoto
Miyuki Nouguchi
Description of Sports Time Machine project.
This is what we call a community of people around the time machine for sports.
At the center of this community is the Sports Time Machine, which people in the community wish to carry on.
What the Machine does is to preserve and store the experience as a medium and share it with others in future,
unlike one’s memory never to be retrieved.
With the Machine, you experience physical communications that intersect past, present, and future through sports.
Also, the Machine keeps updating its function like how the traditional sports at their very beginning.
While being shared in local communities, the Machine is simultaneously developed, maintained, and revised by reflecting how it is being played with.
When we exhibited in Yamaguchi, the people who played a keen part in the milieu of the Machine was
IT engineers, families, people who worked nearby and kids who became very curious about the Machine.
What the Machine actually did in Yamaguchi was to expand the concept of sports in a local community through IT,
and as a result, it blended technologies further into their ordinary lives.
People who came to the exhibition got familiar with the idea of what would be the future sports in the IT era,
and willingly participated to make one.
Players of the game became the key player of the Yamaguchi City’s local community.
After playing, the data were collected and uploaded to the cloud-based servers, on which let the player can manage
the data on their personal pages.
Such ubiquitously expanded functions that give the players are another important aspect added to the Machine.
We believe that this openness to its function is distinctively similar to what conventional sports did to our
societies, and this is one way how a future sports will contribute to the communities.
Project History
The idea of the Sports Time Machine was submitted to the LIFE by MEDIA International Competition by YCAM in April 2013, by Ryoko Ando, an interior designer, and Hiroshi Inukai, a video game and e-sports director. The project officially started when the Sports Time Machine won the competition.
At the very beginning of the project, we had no money or people to work together. We moved to Yamaguchi City from Tokyo, while raising fund on the Internet. We had 9 weeks before showing, which was the only duration of time to put all things together.
Sponsors in Yamaguchi provided their equipment, so a 24 meters long lane (48 meters for a round trip) became possible, and real athletic tools were brought from a closed-down elementary school due to the depopulation of the area. Simultaneously, IT engineers in Yamaguchi and Tokyo collaboratively worked to complete its software. After the location was fixed to a vacant shop on the main street, local store owners and children came to help decorating the place voluntarily.
When the exhibition started on July 6th, 2013, the Machine soon gained popularity and many people came to try. The popular local mascot character and the professional soccer players of the local team came and left us their data. Also, the local zoo provided us the data of animals running, such as a cheetah, an elephant and a kangaroo and these data became popular companions to play with.
The mayor heard its reputation and offered us to continue the exhibition, so it lasted until December 1st, 2013, four weeks longer than originally planned.
Volunteers are currently working to install the Machine again in 2014, and their discussions on how to realize it is still ongoing.
Later, the Machine received an excellence award of the entertainment division from the 2013 Japan Media Arts Festival, which gave us the opportunity to exhibit in Tokyo for 2 weeks from February 5th.
So far, the Machine gained total 4069 registered players and 12,121 data in both Yamaguchi and Tokyo.
