Power To The People | Altern8

The PTTP project came from three ideas and one event. At first, we wanted to give the public flexible, comprehensive control of the fountains in Bristol City Centre. Then, we quickly realised that we could build a framework for anyone to easily add public control to installations large and small. Finally, as we saw quite how powerful such an idea could be, we determined to make this actually happen. It was worth building.

The event that made this possible was the Media Sandbox pitch. The enthusiastic response to our ideas convinced us that it had to be done.

As we fleshed out the project, some reality asserted itself. Control of the City Centre fountains remains our long-term goal, but we quickly realised that we couldn't do that within the timescales of this project, so we'd need to create our own playground for developing, testing and demonstrating our ideas. We did this at the same time as we were designing PTTP and writing the software to make it work. We also researched and in some cases started work on wildly different playgrounds, as well as laying the foundations for a community website for everyone interested in PTTP.

The computer software is at the heart of the project. We've designed PTTP to work very much like HTTP, the lingua franca of the World Wide Web, so we've written the equivalent of a web server. This handles all the user requests and controls the playground appropriately, while taking care of queuing multiple requests, allowing users to interact and keeping the playground running within whatever rules the playground designers set. Because it's so similar to the Web, anyone with experience of simple Web development will have no problems working with what we've built so far.

Our demonstration playground is called Instant Graffiti and it projects animations onto buildings, or a screen, if you don't have a spare building lying around. It presents the user with a simple interface a little like an Etch–A-Sketch toy, and generates startling neon graphics. We've greatly appreciated AntiVJ’s input on this front, and the inspiration we gained from Light Up Bristol's creative use of projectors.

It's based on a flexible Web-based animation system we wrote for this playground; like everything we've done, this system can be re-used for other ideas and we foresee ourselves establishing a large collection of such building blocks for other people to piece together. One of our design goals has always been to make it easy for anyone to create alternative user interfaces for a playground, and we've found that this is both possible and easy to do.

We've also found that working on a PTTP installation is an involving and rewarding experience. Some people immediately understand the ideas and work together quickly and productively, excited by the chance to create what they so clearly see. Others enjoy mixing with people of different specialisms, with the media and the technology sides striking ideas off each other and learning new viewpoints. The non-commercial environment is also really good for new thinking and experimentation

The focal point for anyone interested in following or assisting with the development of PTTP is at http://wiki.mediaplaygrounds.co.uk This is a Wiki, a collaborative website that anyone can read or add to with ease, and as well as the technical documentation it now has a fine collection of suggestions for potential applications of PTTP, including Ferrofluid Sculptures and programmable, interactive lighting installations. In some cases, we've already started work on turning these ideas into reality — Jon Williams has built a prototype LED cube, for example, that we are greatly looking forward to hooking up with PTTP.

Finally, we have begun exploring some commercial applications of PTTP to complement our plans for purely cultural installations.

Altern8 Ltd is a software design and consultancy business which has been trading since 1998.