It all started as a joke.
A bunch of bored graduate students started throwing a foam dart at a whiteboard. This morphed into software that combined an interactive touch display with Nerf guns.
More and more students started playing. Anything to keep us from working on our dissertations.
This distraction turned into an even larger one when we somehow convinced our supervisor to get involved.
This is the story of NerfBoard, a failed attempt to reinvent the pub room game and secure $20,000 in funding.
History of SmartBoard DartBoard
Back in 2006, my labmate Ian Bull found a Nerf dart on the floor of the building where our offices were located. Ian being Ian, brought this dart back to our lab and started throwing it at people. By happy accident, we realized that the dart would stick nicely to a whiteboard.
We hand drew a rudimentary dartboard on a whiteboard and started taking turns throwing the dart at the board. Eventually more students started participating and this led to inventing rules for the game and tracking scores on a manual entry scoreboard.
Recognizing the enjoyment this low budget game was bringing to her students, our very patient and always supportive supervisor, Dr. Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey, bought the lab Nerf guns for Christmas. This let us take the dart game to the next level. Instead of forcing the shooter to throw a dart, now all they had to do was aim and shoot. This made the game more inclusive and competitive.
As the competition heated up, this often led to disputes about scores and whether a dart was truly in a scoring area or outside. Additionally, the hand drawn dartboard was taking a beating from so many games. Eventually, Peggy jokingly suggested that we should write a program that uses our lab’s Smart Board to track and score the games. By the next morning, Ian, Chris Callendar, and I launched SmartBoard DartBoard v1.
The initial version supported five distinct scoring areas that would register when a dart hit the Smart Board. Smart Board’s register a touch as a click event, so the collision detection for a dart hit was really simple to create.
We did run into one problem. When a dart was stuck to the Smart Board, a second dart hit wouldn’t register. We read that the Smart Board was multi-touch, so I reached out to the manufacturers to see if there was an SDK we could use. After failing to hear anything back, we went with a low tech solution by puncturing a pin sized hole in the dart suction cup. This forced air into the dart seal when it was stuck to the board, automatically forcing the dart to drop soon after a hit.
Our SmartBoard DartBoard was a hit. More and more students were regularly playing. We were unintentionally keeping many students away from working on their research. The game kept track of high scores and disputes about ins and outs ceased to happen.
The pitch
Over time we continued to expand the game to include sounds, fireworks for special events, and other games. We created a pulsating dartboard where the circles grew and shrunk. We created a game where different sized circles bounced around the playing surface area (see the image below). We created different versions of the classic game with aggressively smaller scoring areas.
In January 2007, another graduate student, Tricia Pelz, informed us that the Innovation & Development Corporation (IDC) was having an invention competition for faculty and students with a top prize for $20,000. We joked about entering and patenting the SmartBoard DartBoard.
Quickly our jokes started to get more serious. We started to think there could be an educational angle to the game. It could teach people how to code or about physics. These email-based brainstorming sessions eventually landed us to a suggestion to turn SmartBoard DartBoard into a pub game.
In my email reply, I commented, “at first I thought the patent idea was kind of silly, but the pub angle is an interesting one“, and Ian agreed, “As much as we did this all as a joke… I do think it could be patentable.“
SMARTBOARD DARTBOARD BECOMES NERFBOARD
As with all great ideas, we started by focusing on coming up with a killer name. We bandied about suggestions like SmartDart 2000, eDart, and DartToSmart. We eventually settled on a suggestion from our supervisor, Nerfboard, with Snarts as a backup.
Our ideas for Nerfboard continued to expand as we put together our invention pitch. To broaden the appeal of Nerfboard, we talked about incorporating a simple to use game designer where the owner of the Nerfboard could create custom games with simple drag and drop.
We imagined Nerfboard fitting into any pub’s collection of games right next to foosball and shuffleboard. Our group think on this project helped take this from a joke to something we actually believed to be a good idea with some legs.
The following is straight from our invention contest entry.
“Most games that incorporate shooting at a screen do so with game controllers that are shaped as guns and that emit infrared light. Although many of these games are successful, they cannot emulate the sensation of firing a real projectile. Moreover, since the emitted light is not visible, the games lose the community spirit of the games that involve real physical devices, like tradition darts.”
“This invention proposes an interactive dartboard and game board designer for foam darts. Foam darts have seen a recent rise in popularity due to their entertaining and safe use in a variety of dynamic games. From our experiences, we notice that consumers often draw a simple dartboard for target practice. We propose using a touch sensitive screen to display an interactive dashboard and game board designer.“
Makes sense right? Surely you’d give us $20,000 for this.
The contest results
On February 20th, 2007 the finalists for the contest were announced. Unfortunately Nerfboard didn’t make the cut. Apparently the IDC didn’t see the same potential we saw.
Our supervisor, perhaps at this point worried about losing control of her grad students, reminded us “but seriously… it does take us away from *real* work…“.
We stopped investing time in Nerfboard (minus the occasional game) and returned to focusing on our research. Ian graduated the next year, and I followed him out the door when I graduated in 2009.
Over time, we realized we got lost in our enthusiasm for the project and Nerfboard was really nothing more than 1984 Duck Hunt.
Actually, it was worst :-). It required a very expensive touchscreen and physical foam darts.
Nerfboard was fueled by silliness and our ability to get lost in an idea, even a bad one. That same childlike enthusiasm for a new project continues for me to this day, nearly 15 years later. As silly as this “invention” and contest entry was, it’s still one of the most fun best worst ideas I’ve been part of. As my former co-founder liked to say, the path to 1% awesomeness is paved with 99% bad ideas.
If you’re curious, you can check out the source for Nerfboard on GitHub.
