Project

Cybersport

Proof of concept

Cybersport hired Limitless to develop new technology so that they could see if it was possible to have online shared participation in fitness and sporting events.

CyberSport approached Limitless in early 1996 to create a proof-of-concept system against a functional specification.

Their idea was to use fitness equipment, such as rowing machines, connected to personal computers. These PCs, in turn, would somehow be organised on an ad-hoc basis over the public Internet, to allow several people to participate in a shared event, such as a rowing race. Cybersport would then provide the focal point for these events, and would offer proper fitness advice and training remotely.

In order to find out if this was technically feasible, Limitless was hired to design and build a proof-of-concept system. This involved the design and development of:

• a PC client under Windows to both transmit data about the individual participant whose PC it was, and to display graphically the continuously changing positions of all the participants in the event
• a central racing server to gather, synchronise and co-ordinate event data
• a communications protocol that would work over the public Internet with satisfactory performance for home users with analogue modems

Frank Wales designed the protocol, wrote the graphical Windows client in C++ and the server software in C on Unix.

Theme IdeaTorrent

BarclayNet web site

41 of 43 go to case studies

Web site requirements definition

Berry Bros. & Rudd web site