There’s some great insight in this article and some genius interactions.

Well worth a read and a watch. With handsets being crammed full of sensors (the new iPhone will have a compass) it opens up tons of opportunities.

Posted via web from rickwilliams’s posterous

Posted via web from rickwilliams’s posterous

Tourality is a new type of game for your mobile phone that combines sporty outdoor activity with virtual gaming experience.

In contrast to normal sport simulations, you will face the real challenge of reaching geographically defined spots in reality as fast as possible and before your opponents.

Posted via web from rickwilliams’s posterous

Invisible technology is a concept coined by Heidegger to describe tools that stop being tools and start becoming integral aspects of how we live in and experience the world.

Faris Yakob wrote a well crafted description of where the web is going by explaining the concept of The Invisible Web, you can read the full article here.

Heidegger uses the example of a blind man and his cane. The cane becomes more valuable to the blind man as an extension of his arm, than simply for its ability to aid his journey.

The blind man’s cane moves from being part of the external environment to becoming an extension of the blind man’s body.

Broadband internet access is often described as ‘Always On’.

‘Always On’ reminds me of having my TV on standby – on at the touch of a button!

And yet, my television doesn’t do anything until I ask it to.

‘Smart’ devices combine their purpose with live contextual data including time and place to create a usefulness that takes the internet to a wholly new realm.

Smart devices aren’t ‘Always On’- they’re ‘Never Off’.

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:

Or take a look at last year’s event below:

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.

Just download and play!

Developed in partnership with HP IdeaLabs, MediaScapes are cool for two reasons:

a) The storytelling matters
b) The breadth is infinte

You can create a fictional espionage game or an educational guide to a city using exactly the same piece of software and target different people.

More can be found here, here and here.

Here’s a video of a game played across London:

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.

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.