A set of cones (actually plastic drinking beakers) were placed in a 3 by 3 arrangement with the centres of cones set at various distances. In the first experiment we made the centres at 15 meters. Runners were asked to run around the grid as a set of 4 squares. You can see the pattern by looking at the first example.
The blue trace is the one that we are looking at. The lawn from top to bottom is about 30 meters. We placed beakers at the edges of the lawn, so you can see that the track is shifted a bit upwards. The first square to be run was the upper right, then a u-turn to work on the lower right. Similarly the lower left and then upper left were completed. If one overlays a grid of 15m squares then we can see that an accurate tracking of the nine squares could be made.
This doesn’t work out so well if we reduce the size of the grid to 10 meters. It works but only just
Same picture but with more details below.
Thanks to Sam for running these.
Next set of tests were done with skateboard, inline skates, and longboard. Here is Oscar’s skateboard run. Note that because the aerial photos on Google are a couple of years old, you can still see the swimming pool, whereas in reality this has been filled in and leveled. The cones were places at the centre of the squares, which at the edges is pretty much the maximum available room. It is not too apparent that at the top, there is a wall (level with top parts of green) and you can make out a cycle track above on the higher level. This test worked well, although a little unclear because we forgot to stop the test at the end (I will tidy this up and improve the contrast if I get a moment). Test a success.
Perrie came next with the inline skates. Not sure what happened here – the skating was good but the track didn’t record as well. Will need to try this one again when I do the next round of tests. Maybe start the test with a run around the whole area(?)
Finally to Seth on a longboard. Interesting in that because of the way the board moves you can see the more rounded corners of the turns. This run works well in that it gets well into the centres of the squares (though if you were marking a track that required you to return to the centre from each complete square of 4, the test would fail on the lower left square. This could have some implication on how one creates a game.
Thanks to the testers. Here are Perrie and Oscar.
