Race to the PCAs

About

Race to the People’s Choice Awards was an interactive game built for the 2019 People's Choice Awards. It was exhibited in New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica in October and November 2019. Race to the PCAs was a roll-a-ball style carnival game where players rolled balls up their lane to move their avatar across the track.

Fifth Class Designs oversaw the electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and programming of the game. In addition, Fifth Class designed and fabricated custom mounts to integrate all electronics and mechanical hardware into the tracks and lanes.

Race to the PCAs was comprised of 6 roller ball lanes, each with 6 ball hole sensors, powered by individual daughter boards collecting point data for each lane. This data was relayed over cat6 to a motherboard that managed all of the lanes, aggregating point data and controlling motor movement. Each time a player sunk a ball into a hole, the accompanying sensor was triggered, moving the player’s avatar forward along the track a set amount based on the point value assigned to that hole. When one player’s avatar reached the end of the track, a win switch was triggered, generating win-state audio and a custom LED animation. At the end of the game, all players’ avatars reset to the front of the track to wait for the next game to start.