VIRO Rides Street Drifters
2017-2018
With KEK Associates Inc.
“Experience the intense carving action of VIRO Rides street drifters. These freestyle sideways skates combine skateboarding and inline skating into one, delivering an all new kind of adrenaline rush. Stay outside the lines with street drifters."
Mechanical design
Tasked with developing an intuitive way to learn how to ride drift skates, a series of robust prototypes were fabricated to test various mechanical solutions. Through four rounds of kid testing at MGA Entertainment, we honed the mechanical design of Street Drifters into an effective learning aid for the very unintuitive body motion needed to ride drift skates.
Prototyping
Our prototypes allowed for a wide range of testing: centering spring tension could be adjusted, training wheel height could be fine tuned, rotational gearing between foot pads could be engaged. Five prototypes were fabricated over four months and shipped for kid testing.
Human Factors
Aimed at a wide range of ages, Street Drifters needed to be adjustable to match shoulder widths from nine years old to adulthood. To ease the learning curve on drift skates, a modular system was developed for incremental difficulty.
