A project on Kickstarter has recently met its goal for funding, and it looks very promising and very cool.
It’s called “Ninja Blocks” and works to integrate the virtual world with our real one.
It does this using small, hardware-based sensors that can be placed anywhere. By setting up a series of actions and triggers you are able to accomplish a variety of tasks.
With a bit of creativity, your local church can benefit from this emerging technology.
Ninja Blocks
According to the Kickstarter project home, possible triggers include:
- “Movement has been detected”
- “The temperature has risen above”
- “You’ve been tagged in a photo on Facebook”
- “You’ve sent a new tweet”
- “A button has been pushed”
- “Sound is detected”
- “Your friend has checked in”
Similarly, example actions include:
- “Display text on an LCD display”
- “Play a sound”
- “Send a tweet”
- “Open a relay”
- “Turn on a light”
- “Send an SMS to my phone”
- “Post a message on Facebook”
Ninja Blocks and Your Church
How might your church use Ninja Blocks? Every church is different and what works for one won’t work for another. That being said, here’s some thoughts I had:
Wandering Visitors: In my church, the offices are on the opposite side of the building as the sanctuary. While this is a fine setup most of the time, we occasionally have visitors come through the building mid-week just to check us out. We have no way to monitor such activity and the visitors must rely on signs (that they may or may not read) to find the offices and see if anyone can help them. It would be great to have a Ninja Block sitting by the sanctuary entrance (which appears to be the main entrance from the parking lot) that would send an alert anytime it detects movement in the narthex. For smaller churches, there may not be someone at the church during weekdays. Would-be visitors find doors locked and must make the decision whether to come back again on Sunday to talk to somebody “in charge”. It would be nice to monitor when someone approaches the building and send an alert to the pastor.
Utility Management: Utilities could be managed using a device like this. For instance, if movement is detected in an area of the building, Ninja Blocks could crank up the thermostat. Of course, the thermostat would have to be integrated into current mobile technologies, but the savings that could be generated from such enhanced management should offset the cost of a new thermostat.
Monitoring Checkins: This wouldn’t require any additional hardware as far as I can tell. One of the features of Ninja Blocks is the “Ninja Cloud” where everything happens. The software could be set up to monitor when parishioners check in to certain places on FourSquare and then send a notification or tweet. Perhaps this serves as an alternative way to do attendance sign-ins on Sunday morning (“please take a few minutes to complete our connection cards or use your phone to check in on FourSquare”). The Ninja Cloud could then send an email to an account set up to collect the data. Or perhaps the software will allow for integration with Google Docs.
I’m sure there are plenty of other possibilities out there that I’m not thinking of.
So, how would you use Ninja Blocks for your church?
Gus Vega says
This is amazing! I sent this article to our facilities guy and HE pretty much wet his pants with excitement. There have numerous times that we have had people come on our church campus and mess with some stuff in our tool sheds or portable classrooms. This can help combat that, Thanks for the info.
Also a side note, I noticed in the picture the cool looking dashboard on the ipad, is that certain kind of browser that does that? If so what is it? Thanks for the help.
Eric Frisch says
I can think of all kinds of uses for these, both at church and at home… thanks for highlighting this!
Chris Ruddell says
Glad I could help! Eric, if you come up with specific uses for the church that I haven’t mentioned, please share!
Gus, I believe the iPad picture you see is Safari loading a web-portal for Ninja Blocks. The full-size picture is at http://img.skitch.com/20120127-r654se4xy3xi1pnp8hgxn72weg.png. If you look closely enough, you can see that it is loading a local ip address, so the web-portal will likely reside on a desktop computer. Perhaps they’ll develop an iPad-friendly app in the future though.
Mark Wotton says
Chris – good eyes 🙂 it will actually connect to our server on the net – no computer required, except to log into the website and instruct the blocks. It was a local IP because Marcus was running it locally for the demo.