Tom Hume

So, it's been a week since I got back from Mobile 2.0 - and therefore highly remiss that I've not written about it yet.

I really enjoyed both the Developer Day and the main event. The former seemed to be focused around mobile web - with widgets in particular getting a lot of prominence. Whilst I'm not convinced that widgets are the future of all mobile apps, it's an area where - until recently - I've let myself lag behind a little, so I got a lot out of the sessions. And one quote from the very beginning has stuck with me - Dan Appelquist remarking that applications are nowadays being consumed more like songs than software.

The main event was pretty decent. On both days some panel discussions had a tendency to get a bit angels-on-pinheads - the one where 4 people debated publicly about who was most "open", each using a slightly different definition of the much overused word, didn't really hold my attention. But the off-track talks really shone for me - Tom Raftery berating the industry for its at best token gestures towards environmentalism, and Regine Beatty and Atau Tanaka one-upping each other with wonderful examples of mobile frivolity. And outside of these, Ted Morgan of Skyhook talking about their business (200m location searches a day, vs 300m or so Google searches per day!) and Priya Prakash's talk on Beyond Free (an evolution of the last few sessions I've seen her do) were particularly memorable.

The venues (Barcelona Activa and ESADE) were both excellent (modulo the temperature of rooms in the former, which got quite stuffy). Now I've experienced the double-whammy of rock-solid wi-fi and power at every seat, I suspect I'm going to be a little spoilt.

More than this though, on a personal level I got a lot out of the event. It seemed to have a perfect mix of 50% familiar faces and 50% new (and friendly) ones - I'm not a natural networker, but felt very comfortable at the event. And in particular it was great to finally meet Dom and Francois of the W3C and Mike Rowehl - all of whom I've known for a while, but only in a virtual sense. It's nice to have that corrected :)

I did a couple of sessions; one on Mobile User Experience for Developer Day, which was well attended but missed the mark a little, I felt. I emphasised how we run UX alongside development at FP over and above the specifics of mobile UX, and whilst my audience seemed happy to engage on this, I think I could've either been clearer in the title for the session, or put more emphasis on tactics than on process.

The "play" panel I sat on at the very end of the event was a different matter: really good fun, and an utter privilege to talk about location-based gaming, ghost hunting, shitting and sex, generative music and digital rights issues with Professor Tanaka, Gustav Soderstrom of Spotify, Akhil Monappa of Atlas Venture, and Michael Breidenbruecker - the lovable nutter behind Last.fm and RJDJ - all ably held together by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.

And again, on a personal note I had a very interesting chat with Ted Morgan at the post-event dinner, learning exactly what it's like to get into work one day and find a message from Steve Jobs on your voicemail :)

Thanks to Rudy, Dan, and all the organisers and behind-the-scenes folks who made it happen. I'm already looking forward to next year, though I think I might give myself an extra day in Barcelona to help recover from Sonar...

I forgot to post about BOGFest - Brighton Outdoor Gaming Festival, the inaugural event of which was held last weekend in Brunswick Square - curated by Richard Vahrman of Locomatrix fame.

There was a programme of events running all afternoon; after a diary clash with a 5th birthday party, I managed to make it along at 4, missing Tai Chi Twister and Clock the Doc but arriving just in time to kick off some games of Fruit Farmer, one of the Locomatrix formats.

It was really interesting seeing Real People playing Fruit Farmer. We cheated completely, of course, and presented each player with a phone and GPS unit that had been preconfigured with the application installed - in real life they'd have to do this themselves, which we know to be a bit of a barrier (though the geocaching crowd seem to use applications on occasion, so it's not completely out of the question).

We had 6 pairs of players run off for a game. All bar one of the pairs managed to locate themselves quickly and orient themselves against the on-screen map - working out what direction they had to run in to do anything useful. A few players noted that their position was a little laggy, and we were slightly embarrassed to find out that the game layout we'd chosen for the day was slightly too large for the playing area - meaning that players would've had to climb onto the roofs of local buildings to collect a few of the larger pieces of fruit. Memo to self: next time, check map first.

But that said, players seemed to enjoy the game - particularly some of our younger participants:

Also throughout the day we had some treasure hunts running, a scavenger hunt at the end of the day, and Tristan brought along his Hunt the Wumpus QR-code game - he's written a great post on how it went for him, which you can find here.

Time constraints meant that I never got to show off ArchaeoloGPS, the game I've been doodling with recently. Perhaps next year... :)

And last but not least, a few bits and pieces that don't fit into any box, but are lovely nonetheless:

• Afrika, a PS3 wildlife game where you photograph animals. Ahem, "first-person shooter".
• Story arcs and The Wire. The Wire followed BSG as the second ever TV series I've bought the DVDs of and plodded through - and has delivered way more enjoyment than the slightly beautifully-started yet damp-squibbish Galactica has so far managed.
• Everything you know about ARGs is wrong, from Dan Hon. Dan channels Charlie Brooker and burns his boat. Mobile-obsessed myself, I'm wondering when it'll be safe to drop gratuitous multi-platformness that seems to infect the genre in favour of a game that you just play all the time with your phone.
• Iain Tate of Poke on high scores

So, Barcamp Brighton 3: absolutely fantastic. I'll scratch down a few thoughts before they evaporate:

• Really annoyed I missed Paul Silver talk on social networks and death: he brought it up at Tuttle last week and it sounded really great;
• Saw 2 talks on Selenium: I am going to be force-feeding this to our QAs until they burst;
• The last afternoon was appropriate New Age, given that we were in Brighton. Sunday closed for me with a yoga session with Jenny, meditation and GTD with Michael Rose, then a retrospective on the whole of Barcamp ably facilitated by Joh;
• The highlight was Rebecca talking on typography and design, which seemed to be the best-attended of the whole event (necessitating a mid-point shift in venue) and generated some really good debate afterwards. No Tantek, there is no repository of mobile typography. Yes Tantek, mobile fragmentation really *is* that bad.
• I also really enjoyed James' skit on Derrida and XKCD (so much that I forgot my promise of a good kicking if he ever mentioned Big D again), and the session which combined Thai OCR, DNA sequencing and minority African languages... but ended up being a database optimisation back-and-forth with the audience :)
• We decamped to a dark corner for the warts and all of Scrum - my talk on the last year at FP, which I may be repeating locally in the near future...

The only low point for me was the university food - but hey, out of everything that had to be organised and put together to bring an event of this scale to fruition, that's quite properly a long way down the list.

Already looking forward to the next one :)

dConstruct 2008: Aleks Krotowksi: Playing the Web

The web industry and the games industry DO NOT MEET. Strange, given that web people don't talk about games.

Games are sticky. Some people die playing games; many people lose their lives playing them. Stickiness is important because of advertising. (Shows a Wordle of business plans from Seedcamp to demonstrate the important of advertising to business models).

What do game designers do to create this social web and stickiness?

Graphics? Games have great graphics, but some games (e.g. VIb Ribbon) have deliberately poor graphics and are still compelling. So it can't be graphics.

Story? Many games have strong stories. But traditionally the story is the last thing to be stuck onto a game system.

No, it's the stickiness of play. "The experience economy": a very boring term for the word "fun".

Games designers and developers use three systems to bring social elements into games:

1. Controlled systems: what designers explicitly build, deliberately giving reward and encouraging repeat play. The web does this - encouraging an investment of personal data in order to see more value. Also consider openness: creating spaces to play in, or sandboxes. Look at Grand Theft Auto world. Sometimes this backfires, in games which are too open and too large (e.g. Tomb Raider 3). But the web is enormously open, vast space. The challenge is to create a funnel that feels wide enough that you have freedom, whilst directing them towards an "ending goal"

2. Enabling systems: social phenomena emerge based on the design decisions made by developers. On the web we have community; in games there may have been some, but not a great deal until games met the web (with Everquest, WoW, etc.) (Not sure I agree with this: what about LambdaMOO etc?). Look at real-money transfers on ebay arising from virtual goods in online games: a community rallying around a virtual object with real social value. Game walkthroughs or FAQs might fit into this category. There's no need to create an economic model around your site to do this: look at PacManhattan, amillionpenguins.com, PerplexCity, or ludic visualisations.

3. Psychological systems: e.g. the relationship between avatar and reality (shows lovely slide of people photographed next to their avatars). But yet most of the web is personalised: MySpace, Facebook, but even before that pseudonyms/tags/avatar photos. Web developers see points-earning systems as a means of bringing gaming principles to the web. Look at PMOG as a game where you earn points for on-web behaviour (e.g. "don't use google for a week"). Game developers create beautifully efficient feedback systems to encourage repeat play, should they not engage with these types of things? Games developers and designers don't tend to use formal HCI, they tend to be instinctual by nature - and by and large do a good job of it, partially because games developers are making games for people like themselves. In contrast, the web industry tends to be applying their skils to create things for other audiences.
   

Why is there such little games representation at web events?

Ends with a call for a group hug between games and web industry, then questions.

Online games involving community in the form of MUDs/MOOs predated the web by quite a long time. How has the arrival of the web (as opposed to the improvements in graphics and UI) changed the way these communities operate

I've been meaning to post up a little summary of the news on LocoMatrix. There's been quite a lot happening here over the last few months:

• We've been selected to receive a grant from the Technology Strategy Board's Creative Industries programme. It's a joint proposal with Brighton University, all themed around creating tools to assist with authoring games: a really important part of Loco. With a couple of radically different game formats already out there, we're keen to get some third parties using the platform and seeing how their perception of what they need differs from or matches up our thinking so far.
• Whilst we're on the topic of education, we're working with Portsmouth University on a collaborative project starting before the end of this year, the aim being to work with MSc students there on game authoring.
• A nice double-page spread appeared in London Lite, accompanying a story about location-based gaming which featured Loco quite prominently.
• New Scientist also ran a story on real-world gaming, in which Loco MD Richard Vahrman was interviewed.

So, I had a weeks holiday last week; just over a week if you count the previous Friday when I tramped off to Wales with a group of chums for a few days camping and clambering. But - somewhat typically - I'd arranged to spend the week working for a client of ours, Locomatrix, for whom I moonlight as CTO.

If you've not come across Loco before, it's really neat - and weird enough to fit snugly into the Future Platforms portfolio: a platform to enable location-based gaming: you can see a lovely video outlining the concept here. There's lots of action in this area at the moment, what with the commoditisation of GPS and the increased physicality and casuality of gaming that Miyamoto and chums are working hard on, and there are oodles of location-based games out there. But Loco's status as a platform makes it a bit different: sure, we've written a couple of games ourselves to demonstrate its versatility, but the aspiration is to hand this over to the public and let them do much cleverer and more imaginative stuff than we can dream of.

With FP being a mature 8 years old, I no longer get to kid myself that I'm working for a startup, so it was quite exciting to get back to that world again - even if briefly. Four days isn't a long time to achieve much, and I spent the first couple of them doing basic housekeeping: tidying up projects, slimming down applications, packaging things up properly, tidying up build scripts, automating installations... all those things you really mean to get around to doing, which save you oodles of time and hassle in the long run but you never quite get to. By the end of Tuesday Loco was in a clean, maintainable state and I was much more comfortable and familiar with it, ready for a Real Day Off.

Thursday was incredibly frustrating, as I worked on trying to improve one of our game formats, Treasure Hunt. One of those days where you crack on well, and achieve nothing. But my glass was half full: Loco being an outdoor gaming platform, most of my testing effort involved running down to the beach or a local park. Loco HQ is on Brighton seafront, not an unpleasant environment to be doing your testing in at this time of year :)

Friday morning: final tidying up, and a meeting with a potential Loco customer. We're actively targeting agencies and game developers with the platform right now - it feels far too early for LBS gaming to go mass market, we don't have spare cash to burn promoting the concept to the public, but for brands or game authors the platform is a cheap opportunity to do something really unusual today, without the infrastructure costs most LBS game developers usually end up paying.

And the afternoon? Running through the game developer APIs, which I wasn't personally too familiar with, and was pleased to see strike a balance between feature and simplicity. I reckon if I can explain them to someone fresh in less than an hour and they get it, there's something good there. And then working on a backlog of desired features for Loco with a view to sorting out some longer-term planning for the product. Having gone through the pain of introducing decent processes to a software company 5+ years in, I'm keen to start getting Loco into good habits early on :)

So... not exactly a holiday, but definitely a change of scene, a more relaxed atmosphere than the sometimes frenetic pace at FP, and a sense of leaving something better than I found it. I look forward to repeating the experience (perhaps after a real holiday)!

Batty: I've done... questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraodinary things, revel in your time.
Batty: Nothing the God of bio-mechanics wouldn't put you in heaven for.

One part of OverTheAir that I was particularly looking forward to was the hack-day element: getting a load of mobilists under one roof, working overnight within a tight timeframe to put together a novel demo. We'd had an idea beforehand that we'd like to do something which touched on the real world, and there's a fair amount of cynicism internally at FP about the value of some of the mash-ups you see out there today (which is not to say that there aren't some amazing ones too).

So Mr Hopper packed his soldering iron and Arduino kit, and we brought along a collection of devices: a GPS unit or two, a Sony Ericsson K850i and (of course) an iPhone. You can't hold your head up high these days if you don't do iPhone.

On actual ideas, I confess we were a bit fuzzier. I had some vague ideas of things I wanted to explore (e.g. bringing a bit of plausible deniability to digital communications, where it tends to get bumped out in favour of clear explicitness which is quite rare in meatspace), but had no idea of how to turn these into anything practical. So we went with doing something neat with robots.

The K850i is a strange device: a weird keypad and a mix of touch-screen and physical keys which a few handset vendors seem to be trialling at the moment. I find this hideously annoying, there's a really obvious jarring in my head when I press a button on these devices and have to work out whether it's actually been pressed by either looking for visual feedback or feeling through my finger - depending on which key I'm pressing.

But it has one lovely little feature, and that's an accelerometer accessible from J2ME via the mobile sensor APIs (JSR-256). Early this year one of our gold card days yielded an amusing little app using these APIs - a mobile spirit level - so we had a good idea of what we could do with them.

So robot arm, meet wavy mobile: we hooked up the accelerometer in the handset to the network, and (via a little bit of SSH tunnelling to work through the Imperial College firewalls at OverTheAir) connected it to a server running locally on a laptop, with said laptop driving the servos in the arm (connected using the Arduino kit). The result: with a 1-2s delay we could control the arm in at least two axes by moving the phone around.

This was quite fun, but I think we struggled to see it being hugely valuable to the human race. I had some vague ideas about getting the robot on stage, holding hands with it and swaying side to side singing "Give Peace A Chance", but they didn't generate the same excitement in the team that they held for me :)

So next step, add a camera: this was glued onto the end of the arm (making it quite heavy and giving us the sense of the machine straining slightly whenever it lifted up), and connected to an Ee-PC, which took photos from it at regular intervals and uploaded them to a publicly accessible web server. So now we had an arm which could be directed around, and which reported on what it saw: a little more useful, perhaps.

All this took us until about midday on the Saturday - an hour before the original competition deadline, with a few strained nerves as we ironed out last-minute problems and finally achieved consistent control of the beastie. It was here that things really took off as MarkNG and Bryan jumped in, taking the camera output and spreading it as far and wide as possible: in the run-up to 2pm (when the competition eventually drew to a close) photos started appearing on Flickr, in a Flash Lite client, on a Series 60 widget and, of course, on the obligatory iPhone. Our plans to show photos back down on the controlling MIDlet never quite emerged - some last-minute network problems courtesy of Orange (who suddenly started blocking our connections on port 8080 mid-way through the morning, necessitating a switch to Vodafone) had stumped a couple of us for an hour or so, and we never quite got round to completing this part.

The presentation was pretty ghastly, I'm afraid. Carrying a presentation laptop, controlling laptop, photo dumping PC, iphone, S60, iPhone, K850i, etc., all on-stage was a bit of a logistical problem (and we panicked a piece of kit would unplug/break/fall apart). Our preparation was minimal and I was far more nervous than in the previous days talk - when a few technical hitches stopped us showing the robot or phone on the large projection screens supplied, we called the demo short (after showing a film we'd made of it working). At least we managed to vividly demonstrate a theme Bryan and I had talked about the day before: that user interface concerns should be primary in any mobile project, and that development-led products are likely to suffer :)

I was genuinely surprised but obviously chuffed when we won the Best Overall Prototype; I (and a few other people I spoke to) had thought we were odds-on for "most over-engineered", but didn't expect anything else - and competition was strong. The prize, whilst generous, came second to hearing Matthew Postgate intone the words "Octo Bastard" in best BBC English - before the watershed! In particular I thought the LastMinute guys did a cracking job with their accelerometer-based sword-fighting game: I kick myself that we've never thought of this, it was so beautifully elegant and seemed to work really well. I hope that someone turns this into a real product, and I'm rather looking forward to an upcoming project where we will be collaborating with some of the folks from the team that built it :)

So, lessons from all this? Prepare more for presentations next time. Try and get some design involvement (both Hack Days I've done so far have led to the creation of bizarre hardware stuff, I'd like to go for elegance next time). And once you have your hack writing out to a web server, it's clear a whole load of other stuff opens up to you: widget platforms, mobile browsers, web services. As the mobile and fixed web converge (or the former subsumes the latter) it's the web-based services which are going to provide a basis for lots of interesting things, I think.

Also see Mark's writeup of the event, here.

So, I'm back from OverTheAir now, and just about caught up on sleep :)

I thought the event was absolutely excellent: a broad selection of topics for the talks (with 5 or so tracks running at any given time), an interesting selection of attendees (including plenty of folks from outside the usual crowd of mobile faces), and a brilliant atmosphere of collaboration. In particular the event seemed free from some of the operator-bashing which has a tendency to infect industry get-togethers; and I found the individual sessions to be particularly conversational (both those I attended and the talk that Bryan and I gave). It was really great to be able to discuss the realities of, say, mobile testing or approaches to mobile/web development with a crowd of smart people, all coming at the same problems from different perspectives.

In particular I enjoyed the Brian Fling talk, which managed to get even me worked up and enthusiastic about the way things are going (though I think it would be difficult for me, or indeed anyone, to equal the enthusiasm Brian shows for the iPhone).

The wi-fi was, I think, the best of any event I've ever attended: absolutely rock solid and snappy. The food was good, and the accommodation (which consisted of bean bags on a wooden floor) quite pleasant. Sleeping in my clothes for 3 hours before breakfast on Saturday morning left me a little... "fragrant", but what the hey :) And the few problems there were (the fire alarm leading to an evacuation on Friday) seemed to be passed over without trouble - a consequence of diligence by the organisers, I suspect.

I'll post separately about the two places where Future Platforms got most involved: the talk that Bryan and I gave about the PrimeSky astronomy project we've been doing for the Royal Observatory Greenwich, and our entry into the hack competition.

And I can't wait for the next event. Rumour has it there might be something hosted by the MoMo Amsterdam folks which could be interesting. Thanks to all the organisers - Dan Appelquist, Alex Craxton, Margaret Gold, Ian Forrester, Jo Rabin, and all the others I've left out.

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 :)