Tom Hume

At 6 o'clock this evening I dashed from the office up to Brighton station and hopped onto a train bound for London Bridge, to make it to This Happened. It was an absolutely enchanting evening of four talks, each running through the background to a product and its design process. It's late and I only have a few scrabbled notes, but I want to get them down whilst the memory is fresh:

1. Jussi Angesleva on the nasty realities of creating digital wave-patterns which seamlessly(ish) transferred themselves into real water, for an installation in Japan. Interesting to hear about the horrors of doing work which integrates with a space without taking it over (or just sticking up a screen and projecting cute stuff onto it). Cue lots of stories on the pain of cross-continental collaboration or "getting your hands dirty at a distance": edit/compile/test in real life. Icky, and unnervingly familiar: the real world is messy, physical proximity and the ability to have conversations wins out over documentation and electronic tools. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

2. Mr Schulze gave a slightly downbeat and self-effacing version of the Olinda story. It was refreshing to hear that even geniuses have problems balancing consultancy and their own product development, and a bit sad that the beeb can't produce the Olinda radios: I really hope that someone takes the open source designs and builds them (and that a suitable public back-end can be found for the social goodness which lurks backs them up). I wanted to know more about the modularity of the hardware too - Jack hinted at some smarts behind that side of things.

3. Kenichi Okada showed off animal superpowers, my absolute favourite: toys to give children the perspective of animals (giraffe for adult-style height of vision, ant for microscopic sight through "feelers", and bird for a homing instinct). Beautiful looking toys, charmingly simple, wonderfully presented. Timely for me too: I've been thinking a lot about animals recently, and had a blog post on the topic which MarsEdit seemed to drop somewhere :(

4. And finally, Hattie Coppard of Snug and Outdoor ran through their experimental playground kit: incredibly cute, kinda life-size lego. And her slide on narrative and play had my Loco-sensors tingling: arenas, pathways, obstacles, territories, thresholds, destinations and sanctuaries being the components of games. What a beautiful way to envisage outdoor play!
   

All great stuff, all thoroughly recommended. Please don't tell your friends, I think I only just scraped onto the entry list this time around and will be sad to miss the next one :)

PICNIC07: Dennis Crowley

Used to work on Dodgeball, now looking at how people experience urban spaces. Sounds like a micro-dopplr: once your friends are aware of your location, it encourages interactions.

Now works at Area/code. As devices and people become location-aware, they're using this data for playful purposes.

Plundr: why should games be restricted to a board? Why can't monopoly be played across Manhatten? Plundr uses wi-fi positioning and creates a commodity trading game around it. Islands are superimposed onto a real-world map by the game, and players collect items from islands to sell them on other ones. It's a bit like a location-aware dopewars, where you need to physically move.

(Wonder what, exactly, he means by "wi-fi positioning")

Done a game for the Sopranos; a game you play whilst you're watching the broadcast. Each element on the game board appears in the TV show, and the aim of the game is to position the elements on the game screen such that as many as possible are in the programme at the same time: betting that characters appear together. All synced up with the broadcast.

Shark Runners: they partnered with marine biologists, tagged real sharks, and used the movement data of these sharks in the real world game, played out in real time. It's not be played in a short setting, it's a long-term, in-the-background game.

(Is there a term for these games which involve infrequent interactions, but play out constantly?)

Dennis shows Pacmanhattan, obviously. Crossroads is a game where you capture street intersections from other players.

One for the Locomatrix crowd :)

PICNIC07: New interaction partners, Nicolas Nova

The problem with ubicomp: the model translated into gaming is messy, it's not clean.

Examples: augmenting animals. Shows a cockroach controlling a robot; a rat with survival goggles; special collar to track floating dogs; wiring poultry up to the internet.

How about playing against animals, or using animals as partners in gaming? Pac-man against animals instead of against an AI; or another one where a rodent is pursuing you through a virtual environment.

MMORPGs for pets: a dog running around a physical environment, transmitting its movements to a dwarf inside Wow. Twitter communication with a cat: when the cat scratches the device, the device reports onto Twitter - or when a message is twittered by the owner, it's reflected on the device.

Nicolas is not interested in trivialising animals, bee-dogs, or just controlling them. It's about animals, plants or weather as new interaction partners.

Just had this email from the folks at Nabaztag:

"We're choking up a bit. There's a few tear drops on our cheecks. Sadness? Anxiety? Really, it's both. Because it's been a while since Twh, your Nabaztag, that cute little Rabbit in your life, has given even the smallest sign of life! Please, so we can go on, so we can be happy... reassure us, tell us what's up."

Sweet that they do this - that they watch for a customer (me) who's long since paid them any cash, keep an eye on me, and then both to contact me to offer support.

Whilst Mr Melon enjoys the delights of Costa Rica, he's found time to get some of his artwork mugged up - check out Animalgebra on DeviantArt.

(A sleepless night explains the rash of weblog posts, bear with me...)

So the US is about to approve the use of cloned meat; the current system of meat production seems to be increasingly obviously flawed well past the point of being inhumane; and our understanding of animals seems to show that the line dividing us from them is more blurred than we've thought, or allowed ourselves to think.

I'm not a vegetarian myself (of which I'm slightly ashamed, if truth be told), but doesn't this point to an upcoming resolution of the whole way we treat the creatures with whom we share our DirtGlobe?

PawSense: "Even while you use your other software, PawSense constantly monitors keyboard activity. PawSense analyzes keypress timings and combinations to distinguish cat typing from human typing. PawSense normally recognizes a cat on the keyboard within one or two pawsteps.If a cat gets on the keyboard, PawSense makes a sound that annoys cats. This teaches your cat that getting on the keyboard is bad even if humans aren't watching."

Monkeys will pay for Paris Hilton smut: "A team from Duke University Medical Centre, led by neurobiologist Dr Michael Platt, offered 12 thirsty adult male rhesus macaque monkeys a choice between their favourite drink (Juicy Juice cherry juice, ABC News notes), and the chance to view pictures of their pack's dominant, "celebrity" monkey."

Catster - where every cat has a webpage.

Playful interfaces: "Designed by Oki Sato the FOMA N702iS has the element of what I call a “live interface” – simply put the interface you can play with (or interact besides common tasks). The default screen looks like it’s filled with water. If you tilt the phone or shake it, the “water” will behave correspondingly. "

This was one of the aims of Twitchr, the project we did for Baron Jones of Nokia a year or so back. The screen of the app provided a bit of data about your progress in the game in an "ambient" format: a flock of birds, the size of which corresponded to the number of photos you'd snapped. And you could tease this flock around the screen using your keypad, for no reason other than to give you something to fiddle with on your phone. I found it quite therapeutic :)