Nature rePlay explores the role of playgrounds in contemporary urban environments, particularly in developing and underdeveloped countries. The project experiments with digital technology to reimagine play spaces—spaces where children can actively engage with one another and with their surroundings through a new, immersive medium of play.
Since traditional playgrounds have always been situated within natural habitats, this project draws from that relationship by developing a concept rooted in nature. It plays with themes of environmental interaction and music, inviting children to experience play in a space where nature, movement, and sound intersect. Conceived as an immersive environment, Nature rePlay incorporates interactive digital media within both real urban contexts and performative settings.
The project builds on the idea of human connectedness, using the playground as a metaphor for liveliness, interactivity, and social networks within built environments. Just as conventional playgrounds include swings, see-saws, and slides, Nature rePlay offers a people-centric play experience using pendulums as both the prop and medium. The interaction design leverages the pendulum’s physical motion and the human energy needed to animate it. These pendulums, when set in motion, produce harmonic sounds and collisions that generate layered soundscapes and corresponding geometric transformations of a leaf projected within the space.
This work was developed in collaboration with Mansie Verma as our graduation project for the M.Sc. in Design and Digital Media at the University of Edinburgh.
For more information on the project, please see:
Bazlamit, R. & Verma, M. (2007). Nature rePlay: An Immersive Installation. Proceedings of Embodying Virtual Architecture. Alexandria, Egypt: 571–586.