Background:

I have been skateboarding all my life. I got my first skateboard at the age of 4 and now a couple of decades latter I am still skateboarding. Because I really enjoy it and it is one of the most relaxing ways of moving through a city. And therefore in the framework of this competition I wanted to address a certain problem I have encountered skating all over the world. Namely skating after dark. While most cities have a very good illumination in central points, it is lacking streetlights in the periphery or less important places. While skating with no light can be demanding and fun, after a while I always wished I had some sort of light, especially when the road gets annoyingly unpredictable. There are headlights, true that, but they have a more elevated angle on the street and do not show you all the small things (most and foremost: small stones) that could potentially stop your wheel and make you do an unwanted summersault.

Product:

The Solution for this dilemma is the skatelight. Attached to your board in a matter of second, by a simple clip on attaching mechanism, it has a number of LEDs that, because of their proximity to the ground, give the skater an excellent street view. The light can be switched on and off by using the foot-switch (see picture to the right).

Pros:

Apart from making skating safer, especially for kids, the skatelight has more potential advantages:

1. It comes in a set of exchangeable LEDs, which cover the entire colors of the rainbow. The skater can express his/her mood by choosing different colors. Future uses might imply a number of interesting implementations. For example the lights could be linked to biosignals (e.g. heart rate, respiration, brain activity) and therefore display emotions directly. They could run certain light patterns, which would be programmable on your personal computer and transferred to the skatelight via a removable memory stick-like device. The lights could be used to communicate in traffic (e.g. blink, stop) or more interestingly to communicate emotions. All these implementations could be used in games, based on these implementations. These could be part of Phase II.

2. By having lights on the skateboard a whole new range of photographic implementations will become available to the skater (e.g. longtime exposure photography with light trails). So it can enhance your creativity.

3. Even more interesting is the possibility to add a video camera mount to this setup. In order for the skater to record his skate videos. These riding videos will be of way better quality due to the well light street scenes.

Even though the skatelight is created specifically for the skateboard, it can be adapted to any board or rolling device (e.g. roller skates, rollers, snowboards, surfboards) for an enjoyable riding experience.

Thanks for your attention!

R.