2hrs of radio is sampled and displayed as a spiral of varying colours. The colours and their length within the spiral depict the type of audio playing e.g. talk, phone-in, pop song etc.
The most interesting thing about this is mentioned at the end of the presentation when Alia parallels what can be learnt just by looking at the visualisation of the stream in the same way as you’d use metadata.
This ties in nicely with this article from the Times onlne which reports on the announcement by the BBC that they’re prepared to work with commercial rivals in both programme making and digital advances.
Such a tool would massively minimize costs involved in finding archive clips within long form programming very cheaply.
Hide and Seek is a festival of social games and playful experiences, running in London from the 27th to the 29th of June 2008.
The festival celebrates the creative and social aspects of gaming, and invites artists from all disciplines to experiment with game design as a creative tool. This year sees projects from Blast Theory, Gideon Reeling (who were behind the Masque of the Red Death performance after parties on Fridays and Saturdays if you went), Momus, Jane McGonigal, and Coney, as well as parties, seminars, and a bunch of low-tech, high-fun games from the Sandpit.
The focal point of the festival is the Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall, where players can sign up for the big events, hire out devices to try GPS gaming, play Sandpit games, and interact with a variety of weird and playful installations.
There’s an incredible programme of events and social games to play during the weekend.
Sign Up to some of the following games:
Gold Bug Dissected produced by PunchDrunk, the masterminds behind Masque Of The Red Death.
I was lucky enough to go to Interesting 08 organised by Russell Davies at the weekend. Without doubt the most visually impressive presentation of the day came from James Le Ferve an animator. This should explain things better than any words could:
Genius!
Many thanks to Russell for putting on the event. I suspect next year’s will be much more mainstream – and justifiably so, it was incredibly…Interesting.
Bring a public park alive with a swashbuckler’s adventure complete with virtual loot waiting to be unearthed. Tour the Tower of London alongside ghostly guides who reveal the history within. Conduct disaster simulations for emergency responders on real city streets.
Mscapes (short for mediascapes) are digital experiences directly related to where you are. Running on GPS-enabled mobile devices, they change as you move around, enriching the physical world with a layer of digital information, services and media.
Nike PhotoiD has been featured on the Guardian’s website and on Cscout as a new mobile marketing trend.
For those who haven’t heard about Nike PhotoiD it’s a piece of software which analyses the pixels colours within an image and generates a pair of Nike iDs for you based on those colours.
MMS your picture and the word DUNK to 88247.
Not only is it cool but it actually works. I tested it out about 6 weeks ago on some of my friends and they were really impressed.
Eyesight mobile technology is based on advanced image processing and machine vision algorithms that utilize the cellular camera together with user hand movements and translate them to commands on the cellular handset.
eyePlay™ enables the user to act as if they hold an object in their hand and perform real-life movements, while eyePlay™ translates that movement to corresponding actions in a game. Now your gamers can actually drive the steering wheel in a racing game. Or throw a shooting star at an enemy. Or shoot a basket in a basketball game. Let your imagination run wild. The possibilities abound.
In a nutshell, Eyesight technology enables you to use real movement to interact with a virtual world!
The object of the game is to be the first squad car to catch Slippery Sid.
The notorious criminal Slippery Sid has escaped from Jail and is hiding somewhere in the City. Hunted by Police, he is on the move from one hideout to another. You have a Police Squad car and you must try and trap Slippery Sid on one of his hideouts before he escapes to another.
The playing area represents the street plan of the City: these are 25 colored sites where Slippery Sid may be hiding.
The arrows on the road indicate one-way streets and the telephone handsets mark the places where you can get a radio message from Police Headquarters. Some of the radio messages will give you clues about Slippery Sid’s hideout.
There is an element of strategy to Cops & Robbers. Despite having more cops on the board they know less and can only gain more information at specific designated places on the board.
The next type of game I thought about when it came to MMTRG was The Prisoner. The Prisoner was a cult British 60s TV series with allegorical undertones and a very thoughtful and considered plot – which is vital.
It follows a former British secret agent who, after abruptly resigning from his position, is held captive in a small village by the sea by an unidentified power which wishes to establish the reason for his resignation.
During the entire 17 episodes, he is never identified by name and the exact nature of his job is never explicitly indicated, though numerous episodes provide clues. After resigning his position, he is kidnapped and held prisoner in a small, isolated, eccentric seaside resort town known only as the Village.
With the concept and setting laid down, such as it is, the natural premise for a mobile game would be to have a contestant ‘delivered’ into a particular scenario and have the audience, with the help of the Internet, either attempt to track him down or, more interestingly, helping him to escape.
Interestingly, in researching The Prisoner, I found out that ITV is planning to re-shoot The Prisoner for a more modern audeince – what kind of interactive or digital twist they’re planning to give to it, if any, is TBC…
If you’ve never heard of Assassins you need to go here and here to find out more.
Last year Streetwars, a form of Assassin, was played in New York City, Vancouver, Vienna, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, San Diego, New York City, Burning Man Festival and Barcelona. Streetwars is a 3 week long 24/7 watergun assassination tournament.
At the start of the game you’ll receive the following in a brown manila envelope:
* A picture of your intended target(s)
* The home address of your intended target(s)
* The work address of your intended target(s)
* The name of your intended target(s)
* Contact information of your intended target(s)
Once you receive those items, your (or your team’s) mission is to find and kill (by way of water gun, water balloon or super soaker) your target(s).
If you are successful in your assassination attempt, the person you killed will give you their envelope and the person they were supposed to kill becomes your new target. This continues until you work yourself through all the players and retrieve the envelope with your (or your team’s) picture(s) and name(s).
Ssassins is an Assassins game hosting site which makes the job of organising your own Assassins game easier and more manageable.
Hot on the heels of Streetwars is the Vitruve Project (a mobile trans-world espionage game) and
Wifi Army (Mobile real world FPS game) – http://www.wifiarmy.com/ – looking forward to getting involved in them both!
My name is Rick Williams and I'm Creative Development Director at AKQA, London. The thoughts on this blog are mine and not those of the company I work for.
