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The Reaction Panel

The bench rig where the light-and-movement interaction gets designed, before any of it goes outdoors.

Client
Lightmoves
Year
2024
Status
In use as a development tool
Services
Hardware prototyping Software & MVPs
The reaction panel test rig with its lit buttons

Why it exists

The Wave and CityGems both hang on the same question: when a person moves, what should the light do, and how quickly?

That question is cheap to answer on a bench and expensive to answer on a beach. So it gets answered on a bench.

What it is

A panel of lit targets wired to the same class of sensors and drivers the real installations use. It does nothing a finished product does — no weatherproof enclosure, no mounting, no network — which is the point. It isolates the interaction so it can be tuned in minutes rather than in a site visit.

What it is for

The things you cannot judge from a specification:

  • Latency. Feedback that arrives 200ms late feels broken even though every component is working. You find the threshold by playing with it.
  • Difficulty. A game that is too easy is boring and too hard is humiliating. Both drive people away from a public installation.
  • Legibility. Whether someone walking past understands what to do without a sign or an instruction.

Why it is on the site

Because clients rarely budget for it, and it is often the highest-value week in a project. Building the rough rig first is what stops a beautiful, weatherproof, correctly-engineered installation being unsatisfying to use.

  • Prototyping
  • Interaction design
  • Sensors
  • Test rig

Knowledge this took

  • Building a test rig to answer one question quickly
  • Sensor timing and latency tuning
  • Light and sound feedback design
  • Iterating interaction before committing to an enclosure

So we can also build

  • Rigs and jigs that let a team test an idea before building the product
  • Interaction prototyping for physical, non-screen products
  • Latency-sensitive sensing and feedback
  • De-risking the expensive part of a build by faking it first

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