Pilsen +1 at Smart City Expo World Congress 2026: A Game Run by Real Data

At Smart City Expo World Congress 2026 in Barcelona (3–5 November), our browser game Pilsen +1 was on show at the City of Pilsen stand in the Czech Pavilion. Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) is the world's biggest event for cities and urban innovation.

Pilsen +1 is a free game in which you fly a census drone over Republic Square in Pilsen at rush hour. The twist: real data runs it. Cameras on that square count people, bikes and cars, every character with a LIVE tag is a real person or car that passed by a moment ago, and only numbers ever leave the camera, never images.

Event

Smart City Expo World Congress 2026 (SCEWC)

Dates

3–5 November 2026

Where

Fira Barcelona Gran Via, at the City of Pilsen stand in the Czech Pavilion

Project

Pilsen +1, a browser game run by live traffic data from Republic Square in Pilsen

Data

Camera counts of pedestrians, bikes, cars and buses, fresh every minute

Privacy

Counting happens on the camera. Only numbers leave it, never images or faces.

Team

Tadeáš Kapic, Štěpán Varvařovský, Lukáš Vlček and me

Play

pilsenplusone.com, free in the browser

What is Pilsen +1?

Pilsen +1 is a free browser game run by real data from Republic Square, the main square in Pilsen, Czech Republic. You fly a census drone at rush hour and have five minutes to count everyone below you: pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses. And pigeons.

• Anyone who enters your beam gets counted. Counted targets drop data, which you collect to upgrade the drone.
• Crowds drain your battery, so you have to keep moving.
• Beer boosts your circuits, and makes them wobble a bit too.

You can play solo under your own nickname, or as two players on one screen under a team name.

How does real data run the game?

Cameras on Republic Square count pedestrians, bikes, cars and buses. Every minute, fresh numbers fly into the game, so it can tell a calm morning from the afternoon rush or a Saturday market.

Every character with a LIVE tag is a real person or car the camera counted in the last two minutes. When you count a pedestrian with that tag, they walked across the real square a moment ago.

One design decision mattered more than it looks. The data doesn't decide how many characters show up, only which of them get the LIVE tag. That keeps the game equally hard for everyone, whether you play on a quiet morning or at peak rush hour.

GDPR? Only numbers leave the camera

A game fed by street cameras raises the obvious question. The answer is built into the hardware: the cameras count right on the device and send out numbers only. No image, no video, no faces, nothing that could identify a person ever leaves the camera or gets stored anywhere.

That's what made the whole thing possible. Once the only output is a count, you can put live city data into a public game and nobody has to worry about who's on the screen.

Why turn city data into a game?

Cities measure a lot, and most of it nobody ever sees. A number on a dashboard is easy to scroll past. The same number as a cyclist crossing your drone's beam, tagged LIVE because someone actually rode across the square a minute ago, is hard to forget.

So Pilsen +1 is a playful way to show what a city measures, and how.

What does Pilsen measure on Republic Square?

Pilsen is about to rebuild Republic Square, and it measures the square before and after construction in URBREATH, a European project on healthier public space that runs from 2024 to 2027. Nine cities take part, and Pilsen is the only Czech one.

The counts are open data:

• In summer 2025, 73 of every 100 people crossed the square on foot.
• Cars made up 23.7% of the square's traffic in July 2025 and 12.7% in autumn 2025.
• After the rebuild, walkways and pedestrian areas should grow from 825 m² to 1,155 m².

The game has a page on what Pilsen measures, with the sources and links to download the data.

What was at the Pilsen stand in the Czech Pavilion?

The pitch at the stand was simple: scan, play, beat today's leaderboard. Two arcade sticks turned two-player mode into a small duel, and for anyone in a hurry there were cards with a QR code to play later in the browser.

What I'm taking away

• Make data something people can touch. A count becomes interesting the moment it's a pedestrian you can catch.
• Treat privacy as a design constraint, not a disclaimer. Counting on the camera and sending only numbers is what made a live public game possible in the first place.
• Keep it fair. Letting the data decide only the LIVE tag, not the difficulty, means rush hour doesn't give anyone an edge.
• Design for the room. At an expo you get a minute of attention, so the stand was built around a big screen, two arcade sticks and a card to take home.

Sitting on data that nobody looks at? Turning it into something people actually use is the kind of work I do for clients. Message me on LinkedIn, or see my other projects.

Play Pilsen +1

Pilsen +1 is free at pilsenplusone.com. It runs in your browser with nothing to install. It's best on a computer, and two-player mode needs a keyboard or gamepads.

Thank you

Thank you to the City of Pilsen for having us at its stand, and to everyone in the Czech Pavilion. And thank you, Tadeáš, Štěpán and Lukáš, the same four of us who built Klidka at Rakathon 2026. Good to be back at it together.