Escape room monitoring system | #MagPiMonday

If being locked away in a stinky, possibly damp cell is your idea of a great day, you might just enjoy the Raspberry Pi-enabled creepy check-ins from your captor, shudders Rosie Hattersley.

Ferociously cryptic clues, creepy sounds emanating from somewhere you can’t quite pinpoint, strange smells and unexplained breezes, locked doors, promising chests and hidden routes that could lead to salvation or certain demise, plus a display steadily and ominously counting down to zero… Some people just can’t get enough of the suspense, while hotels, town centres and retail parks up and down the land, along with board games and creators of TV game shows such as The Traitors, all play host to the escape room. 

A CCTV surveillance system keeps a watchful guard over escape  room participants locked in an isolated vehicle

As professional Scottish laird-cum-villain Alan Cumming might observe, we all enjoy “a good muurrrder”. Messages from a virtual captor make it clear their smartphone screen is showing your every squirm while you try to solve clues and escape before time runs out. This adds to the game’s frisson, as interaction designer Caroline Buttet demonstrates in her Raspberry Pi-based high-stakes Escape Room game setup.

Caroline often combines technology with interactivity in quirky (and occasionally risque) art installations. She takes an admirably minimalist approach, focusing on how a particular piece of hardware might be deployed to work with a surprising other element. Examples include a world radio combined with a paper map in which a rotary phone dials up live broadcasts from internet stations selected by plugging a headphone jack into places on the map, and a smartphone paper plane game in which players try to fly their craft to preset cities. 

Time-sensitive

Caroline originally devised her smartphone monitoring system for a client four years ago, but it seems more pertinent now that escape rooms have become so wildly popular: there are more than 50,000 escape room venues worldwide (as well as many, many themed murder mystery nights) of which 1,500 or more are in the UK. 

She says the aim was to create a simple, affordable escape room monitoring system. The escape room owner, Mathieu Dorsaz, wanted to be able to see the players enclosed in a room and communicate with them via a chat if necessary. The escape room was located inside a minivan whose location frequently changed (players rented the escape room van, parked up and played wherever they chose). Caroline’s first big task was therefore creating an offline communication system using Raspberry Pi to create a local network.

The players would need to see a screen that displayed their remaining time, as well as clues the owner sent them via a closed chat-based messaging system. The escape room owner, meanwhile, would be able to see players via a CCTV surveillance system (smartphone apps for this were less common then). Messages from a virtual captor make it clear their smartphone screen is showing your every squirm while you try to solve clues and escape before time runs out

Somebody’s watching me 

The monitoring system consists of a smartphone, a Raspberry Pi 3B with a screen attached, and an IP surveillance camera. Caroline chose to use Raspberry Pi because “it is affordable, portable and reliable,” and says she could never have created anything similar for a comparable price (less than €200 overall). 

Caroline’s previous inventions include a virtual paper plane smartphone game…

Once the Escape Room hardware and code are set up, Raspberry Pi operates autonomously. Power it on and the server automatically starts, the web browser automatically opens to the dedicated page in kiosk mode, and a script checks that the system is always working and restarts it if it isn’t. Happily, Caroline reports that there was not a single instance of her setup going down: “I never had to debug the system: it always worked on site.” Less happily, the escape room concept for which she created the project is no longer in operation but, having outlined what’s needed, she’s confident fellow Raspberry Pi creators could easily create their own. 

… and a Raspberry Pi and retro phone world radio player

Caroline herself has escaped too. She set off from Switzerland on an around-the-world cycle ride and reached Thailand 11 months later, recently checking in from Indonesia after 17 months in the saddle. 

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