MadRat Games, a gaming startup backed by the founders of Flipkart and Snapdeal, has developed an interactive suit designed to encourage children to venture out and play even within the restrictive confines of housing complexes.

The SuperSuit, which will be launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month, comprises a digital vest that can light up and talk, a beacon that can sense other players, and a glove to control related devices and target opponents. It also has a gesture engine that can recognise sleight of hand to invoke a protective shield, generate cheat codes and more.

“The idea was to create a Playstation (Sony’s) you can wear, so you can get out of home. If you have something like an Xbox (Microsoft’s), you are tied to the TV,” said MadRat Chief Executive Rajat Dhariwal, who co-founded the company in 2010 with wife Madhumita Halder.

It was while doing research for board games that they realized the emergence of a new play space—between TV and mobile screen-dominated indoors and the vanishing outdoors, which now largely are staircases, terraces, parking lots, balconies, basements and jogging tracks.

They released that in this space the rules of traditional games had changed: cricket had become short cricket, in which hitting a six meant getting out lest you smash the windshield of your neighbor’s car. Badminton became low shuttle due to the low ceilings of parking spaces. Hide and seek was no longer popular, because there are only so many places you can hide in the same building.

“We saw childhood was becoming shrink-wrapped for this generation,” said Dhariwal, whose company has raised $2 million in funds so far. MadRat decided to leverage technology to re imagine games for these restricted spaces.

Source: The Economic Times

Image Courtesy: mid-day