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Surprising Science

To Win This Game, Eat More Fruit Than Your Opponent

Literally: Pixelate is a head-to-head tabletop video game that uses real plates of fruit, special forks, and on-screen positive reinforcement.

What’s the Latest Development?


Designers Sures Kumar and Lana Z Porter have created a unique two-person game, Pixelate, that invites players to see who can eat a plate of fruit — a real plate of real fruit — fastest. The game, which was exhibited at London’s Royal College of Art, consists of a table with an embedded digital screen and jacks into which players plug in special forks. Porter’s Web site states that the screen “shows players which foods to eat and when, while the game detects whether they’ve eaten the correct food by measuring the food’s resistance on the fork.”

What’s the Big Idea?

While it sounds like a great way to get kids to eat better, Pixelate’s purpose is more artistic in nature. Kumar and Porter explain: “In the same way that food is fundamental to our existence as animals, pixels are the fundamental elements of the digital image. Pixelate is a marriage of the two….[O]ur goal was for people to walk away thinking about what it means for the digital to dictate the physical when it comes to what we eat, and what that says about who we are, how we eat, and why.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

Read it at FastCompany/Co.Design


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