Built to Tilt: Innovation Without the Budget

I miss snowboarding.

There’s something about being on the mountain, hurtling down the slopes with the edges carving into the snow. It’s a feeling that sticks in your bones, even when the season’s long over. So when I found myself daydreaming about mountains on a hot July afternoon in London, I did what any rational adult would do:

I went looking for a snowboarding simulator.

Step One: The Rabbit Hole of Over-Engineered Solutions

First up - Google: “home snowboarding simulator”

The results were a mix of:

• Balance boards with foam rollers (fun, but more balancing practice than immersive fun)

• Massive contraptions with sensors and proprietary software (e.g. crazy rigs used by the pros in the off-season – for the price of a new car!)

• VR games promising “immersion”, but not really having compelling physical feedback

Some of the high-end setups START at over £24,000 and even the lower end ones come in at £865. These all come with responsive decks, tilting rails, companion apps, and resistance controls to simulate slopes. They look amazing. They were also completely impractical. As the only snowboarder in the family [at least right now] I don’t think I could justify spending that kind of money or taking up that amount of space in the living room!

So I thought about it a bit more and asked myself instead; what could I do with kit that I *did* have? What if I could get a near-sim experience just by tricking my phone into thinking it was on a slope?

Step Two: The Hack

What I had:

• An old skateboard (not exactly a snowboard, but close enough in shape and feel)

• An iPhone with a tilt-controlled snowboarding game

• A bike phone mount

• A length of wood as a “stand”

• An Apple TV for screen mirroring

• A belief that this could actually work

I mounted the phone onto the skateboard using the bike mount, sideways so the phone sat flat and could tilt along the board’s length. Then I chiselled out a couple of divots into the short length of wood which I leaned the back wheels of the board into - to give the board a slight “downhill” slope and prevent the wheels from moving - opened up the game, and mirrored it to the TV.

Standing on the board, I gently leant forward and back, pushing the board left and right shifting my weight onto the edges of the skateboard and watched the on-screen snowboarder respond to every lean.

It was rough and the sensitivity settings and mount position took some tweaking, but it worked.

What does this have to do with innovation?

This wasn’t just a lucky hack. It was physics, understanding how the technology works and a bit of out-of-the-box thinking.

• The skateboard’s deck had just enough flex and movement to register tilt via the phone’s accelerometer.

• Leaning on it from the side simulated the edge-to-edge pressure you’d apply when carving.

• Because the board was small, it was easy to control the movements while still registering enough dynamic shift to make the game playable.

No custom rig or hours of planning, just a bit of creativity and some gravity.

This little DIY project taught me - or maybe reminded me - of something I encounter every day in my work:

That the best ideas don’t always start with the best equipment.

Too many companies go shopping for simulators when what they really need is a skateboard and a bike mount.

That might mean:

• Using the tech you already have in a more creative way

• Reframing the problem so it becomes solvable

• Building something quick and dirty to test before investing in anything bigger

That’s where I come in.

I didn’t build this thing to show off. I built it because I wanted some fun and couldn’t afford to buy new.

And maybe that’s the best mindset for innovation, not chasing what’s shiny, but redefining what’s possible through creativity.

So if you’ve got a problem - operational, creative, technical and you’re not sure what the next step is…

Before you spend £20,000 on the digital equivalent of a ski lift, ask yourself:

Could a skateboard and a phone do the job?

Need a fresh perspective?

That’s what I do at ikirugai, help people and teams solve problems using creativity, constraint, and just the right amount of tech.

Let’s build something that works. Not someday. Now.