http://www.vimeo.com/1204230

As ever, you can read each project’s journal on the Media Sandbox website, but here’s a round up of their progress over the last month.

Three months into the Media Sandbox scheme and the projects are really taking shape: a solid and supportive project community has sprung up – aided by a majority of the projects working from the same space at the Pervasive Media Studio and by regular meet ups. Some exciting common ground between the projects has emerged through an interesting discussion at one of our evening salon dinner catch ups.

Thought Pie are pursuing four products with their Happy Packages project, all centred around pushing content relating to the concept of happiness to mobile phone users. Their dilemma is negotiating a balance between unsolicited but smile-enducing surprise packages and bombarding unsuspecting users to the point of Pervasive Fatigue.

This concern over the turn-off that is spamming has also been preoccupying Plot London and BDH, who have completed their Happy Towns research into what makes Bristolians happy – geeks and technophobes alike. They are similarly juggling the complexities between pushy advertising and surprise content which gets the conversation going.

Aardman and HMC are exploiting the idea of the ‘surprise attack’ and are researching magic mirrors to bring Aardman’s characters to life in the real world. Who knows what reflection you might see when you pass a shop window soon… Having been researching iris tracking and lip synching Processing techniques they couldn’t help but put some of Simon Evans and Simon Johnson’s swarm theories to the test.

Swarm have been trialling their game concepts on the Pervasive Media Studio residents and at iglab, and have been discovering how physical games can unlock the urban environment. Watch this video to see the city centre invaded by HollaLuLu players.

All useful research for Altern8 who is exploring the public’s interaction with public art installations to enable the city’s potential as a playground. Jon from Licorice Film has been working with Tarim to realise a concept for the demonstration piece. For a really impressive example of their LED cube inspiration click here.

Licorice Film have fleshed out the concept for their multiplayer game Harmonize - an intricate plot involving dreams escaping into the real world. You will be able to play the game at Watershed in May – more details to follow.

Midway Showcase Event
You are invited to hear from each of the projects and ask your questions at the midway showcase event. Each project will be speaking about their experience and findings to date, and it will be a great opportunity to meet up with others interested in pervasive media. Book your place now.

31 March | 6 - 7.30 pm | Watershed
Also, make a note in your diary of the Final Showcase event where you will have a chance to see the results of the scheme.
6 May | 6pm | Watershed

Your input
As well as reading the journals online we would encourage you to add your suggestions and thoughts. This is not a closed research process and the projects will respond to your comments.

We have set up a tag for delicious so if you see a useful website, please include the tag 'mediasandbox'. There is also a flickr group and a youtube channel to add pictures or video. This will help build a body of knowledge from which everyone can benefit.

The next newsletter will be in a month, bringing you updates from the next journal entries and more news about the events.

All the best,
Emma Scott and the Media Sandbox team
http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk

Media Sandbox is managed by iShed working with South West Screen with support from South West Regional Development Agency, Business Link and Watershed.

With the projects' prototypes on show, it was clear that products and opportunities are far-ranging in the emerging realm of pervasive media. Each project reinforced the idea that pervasive media offers an opportunity for the user to be in control, accessing information when they want to, how they want to and where they want to.

Happy Towns' research lead them to the idea of 'slow technology'. Subtle, personalised and an antidote to indescriminate spam marketing, their prototype wearables work like interactive charm bracelets reacting only when they come into contact with a known friends'. At the other end of the spectrum, Swarms' urban game, The Comfort of Strangers, uses pervasive media to connect people who don't know each other.

Power to the People also took to the streets, aiming to make public art installations accessible to the public: PTTP's proof of concept was an 'etch-a-sketch' projection with which the public could use a variety of platforms (mobile, web browser etc) to 'draw' on a building. Aardman and HMC created a "magic mirror", through which a 3D world of Chop Socky Chooks was revealed, moving to align with the audiences' viewing position. And Licorice Film offered a tantalising alternative vision of urban reality in their game Harmonise which will be held at Watershed 17-19 May.

At the end of the event, industry panel judges Paul Appleby (BBC), Sam Ingleby (Intellect) and Dan Sutch (Futurelab) awarded Thought Pie a further £8,000 to take forward the Happy Packages project to develop their four strand approach to bring happy mobile 'gifts' to Bristolians.

There was a further award of £1,000 and a month residency at the Pervasive Media Studio to Wonky, who were judged by the present Media Sandbox participants to have the best new pervasive media idea in a heated Pecha Kucha competition. Wonky will investigate the viability of SSTV - using CCTV footage to make a map of Bristol's Street Sports available via mobile phones.

Congratulations to all the projects on their hardwork and creativity.

If you couldn't make the Showcase, we're currently editing a video from interviews caught at the event, which we will soon make available on our website.

We are really excited by the opportunity visit Come Out & Play, all made possible by Clare Reddington and the PM Studio, who are covering travel costs and HP Labs who are lending us the ipaqs we need to run the game. We will be blogging here throughout the festival, so check back for news of how Comfort went and the other great games we get to play.

For the first time we began to glimpse the kind of dynamics thrown up by large game populations and swarm like behaviour. These manifested themselves in periods of highly fluid, fast moving game-play alternating with periods of stasis. Clearly we need to find a design grammar that can accommodate these characteristics. To do this we have to refine the game so that it is stable and engaging enough accommodate the numbers of people needed to create the effects . Sometimes we feel its a bit like observing events at a sub-atomic level, you haveto build a massive apparatus in order to glimpse tiny elusive phenomena.

One aesthetic issue is proving telling. We added music to the beginning to the piece, to create a mood and to give players an indication that the piece is actually running. Feedback from players at the final event was that they wanted the music to continue throughout the piece. As Duncan Speakman pointed out this would work against the whole premise of the work, which is to encourage people to interact. This is a contrast to his work, where he explores the experience of listening to music as one wanders the city, viewing the environment as if you were in a movie. This is the opposite of what we want to achieve. We want people to engage with each other, the technology being the facilitator of this. The music became a seductive insulator of the 'real' world, behind which people felt safe. So we need to work on this area, re-assuring players but also opening them up to interacting with strangers.

Finally, the conclusion of this year's Media Sandbox might be the end of swarmtoolkit, but the research continue with a new company we are forming to exploit commercially swarm game dynamics in education and HR as well as entertainment. We are calling the business……Simon! No website yet, but we have a logo.

We already have a couple of business opportunities, more news on this and what we are aiming to do in our next post.

It's been hard-core few months, as you might tell from the other blog posts and mediasandbox…a lot of fun, inspiring, challenging, and more than anything this project has opened hundreds of doors for everyone involved. A realisation dawned this week that we really are operating at the forefront of the pervasive media industry…things break, people don't understand, it's new NEW stuff!

Our stand looked beautiful, as did Tom's face beaming out from the 42″ plasma screen. People milled around, took the Happy Packages GPS demo for a test drive, asked us what on earth we were talking about and nodded knowingly when we explained the difficulties working with pervasive convergence in multi-platform content distribution systems.

At around 3 or 4 it was time to deliver the 6 minute presentation and face the judging panel, who were:

Sam Ingleby - Digital Communications Programme Manager, Intellect UK
Dan Sutch – Researcher, Futurelab
Paul Appleby, Series Producer, BBC NHU

It was all over in a matter of seconds (360 I suppose) and as the beads of sweat poured down my face my mouth moved of its own accord, parrying everything the judges could throw out - It's a niche product, a playful campaign machine, a response to the enthusiasm shown by modern consumers to engage with their brands…And as it turned out, the cold hearted commercial hard-sell was what done it for us! After a painful few hours wishing the other Media Sandbox participants the best of luck, the announcement was made.

Happy Packages lives on! After an awkward group hug (and some slick high-fives) up on stage the party was on full swing. It wasn't long until we headed to Start The Bus for more, and while I didn't manage to get the barmaid's number (no appreciation for Pervasive Technology it seems) it was night to remember: Champagne, food, friendly back slaps and promises to take over the world. Watch this space.

The PTTP tribute to Friedrich Hundertwasser. I think the idea fits well with his concept of "window rights" - although he might not have been so keen on all the straight lines.

Although this is the end of the Sandbox project - for PTTP it's just the beginning. The next stage is to look at running some Instant Graffiti Parties to encourage people to play and write some interesting games for it. Keep an eye on the Sandbox lists for dates and on www.mediaplaygrounds.co.uk

Many thanks go to all the Media Sandboxers: Clare, Emma, the panels, the other projects and the many people I've talked to - for seeing the potential in PTTP. Without you, it would still just be an idea knocking around in my head that, although clear to me, seemed too difficult to explain. Thanks to everyone for the encouragement. Publicly controllable fountains, and a whole lot more, are now one step closer

Ok, not really got the time to explain more, but will try and post stuff as it comes available.