One of the great things about academia is the influx of smart students that can inspire. From November, I have been working with 2 students from TU DELFT and the team from TEI course at the IoTaP Lab in a project about energy visualisation and sustainability in the Smart Cities with E.ON. We have been investigating how to use Minecraft and Arduino.
Our aim has been to connect the digital game world of Minecraft to the physical world of Arduino providing the means to explore how energy generation (wind and solar) together with energy storage units created with Arduino we can interface with a modded Minecraft world. The TEI concept
The first concept has been to create a game inspired by the UN Sustainable Goals to get a small team to shift a town in Minecraft to sustainable power. Each player on the team has a different role, citizen, mayor, and industrialist and together they decide which combination of sustainable power they choose to use and how much. As the game unfolds events happen that change the outcomes and each turn the players need to decide how to progress.
The integration of Internet of Things technologies and urban development places Smart Cities in a good position to address contemporary societal challenges. Applications include sustainable energy consumption, traffic management, waste management, public safety and security, and other city-level issues. But equally important are other types of value creation, such as including ICTs in government systems and bringing ICTs and people together to enhance the innovation and knowledge that they offer.
User Testing 
Arduino Wiring 
Concept visualization
