SigEp 2026 Booth Game | Borja de la Mora

About

Game Chair

As Game Chair, I led the end-to-end design and technical implementation of our booth's game — a walk-through installation where visitors used NFC wristbands to collect a musical sample in each of five historically themed rooms, then received a unique pre-mixed track written directly to their wristband to take home.

Booth entrance and overview of the digital themed room

Booth entrance / overview

Close-up of the NFC wristband used for tracking

NFC wristband close-up

The booth had to function flawlessly for hundreds of visitors with no server dependency inside the rooms. Every sample choice was written progressively and directly to each visitor's NTAG213 wristband chip as they moved through the space. At the final digital room, their completed five-byte array was read, matched to one of 193 pre-mixed, pre-mastered tracks, and a cryptographically secure private URL was written back to the band for them to scan at home.

Build Your Own Mix

Pick one sample per room — exactly as visitors did in person. Your unique track assembles itself at the end.

Concert Hall

Gramophone

Radio

Cassette

CD Room

Concert Hall

19th Century

A cello performer craft played live while samples looped through the room's speakers. Visitors scanned their wristband on the cello craft — whichever sample was actively playing at the exact moment of the tap was written to their band.

Gramophone Room

Early 20th Century

A wooden gramophone box sat at the centre. Visitors placed a vinyl record onto it — a hidden reader identified which record was placed — then tapped their wristband to the gramophone's front panel to lock in the choice.

Radio Room

1940s – 1950s

A vintage-style radio with a functional tuning knob. Turning the knob cycled through the four available beats via the Arduino powering the craft. Once dialled in, visitors tapped their wristband to lock in their choice.

Cassette Room

1970s – 1980s

Cassette players and 70s / 80s analog gear

Cassette players and period analog gear filled the room. PN532 readers were wired directly into the cassette slots — visitors inserted a cassette into their chosen slot and tapped their wristband to record their analog hook.

CD Room

1990s – 2000s

CD player setup with era CDs and album covers

CD players and era album covers lined the room. NFC tags were embedded inside the physical CDs — visitors picked up a CD and tapped their wristband to it to write the final piece of their array.

Your Mix

Here's the track your choices assembled.

How It Worked

NTAG213 Wristbands

Silicone NFC wristbands with 144 bytes of memory, universally readable by iOS and Android. With this, the final combination could be extracted to play the corresponding song.

ESP32 / Arduino + PN532

Each room ran an ESP32 or Arduino managing the physical craft interaction, wired to a PN532 NFC module via SPI to read and write directly to the wristband's specific memory block.

193 Pre-Mixed Tracks

All possible combinations (2 × 2 × 4 × 3 × 4 = 192, plus one easter egg) were pre-mixed and mastered in FL Studio. Named by combination code — e.g. 1-3-2-1-2.wav — so the exit server could resolve any array instantly.

UUIDv4 Secure URLs

At the exit a cryptographically random UUID was generated and paired to the visitor's track. The 3.4 × 10³⁸ possible UUIDs made URL-guessing practically impossible. Pages were noindex to block search engines.

iPod Exit Stations

Two large iPod-shaped crafts served as the exit scanners. They read the completed array, matched the track, wrote the secure URL back to the wristband, and played the mix on connected speakers as a final reveal.