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Is it Bluetooth Marketing Spamming? | Dan | Thought PieThere seems to be a debate raging on about whether, Bluetooth marketing being offered by a few companies like, Bluepod media and Blue Broadcast is nothing better than Spamming?
A company company offering the product boasts,
"What if you could tap every potential customer on the shoulder that walks past your door and send them your business card, advert or special offer directly to their mobile phone? What if you could do this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year without ever needing to worry about the cost?" http://bluebroadcast.com/
Does this mean that the service is non-stop and un-relentless? Certain Bloggers have commented that it could be seen as Bluetooth spam or that the unsolicited sending of Bluetooth ads is annoying.
On the Happy Packages Project we're finding that Bluetooth sending/receiving should be a choice made by the consumer, otherwise you could induce Pervasive Fatigue. The bluetooth node should be backed up with certain Peravsive Relations so the consumer makes a certain choice in their head before interacting with their device.
The Happy Fountains are being build on the fact that people can see there's a Bluetooth area around, what the daily theme is (movies, pictures, events) and that there's a black-list which won't re-offer the same content to those opt-ing out.
So are certain companies going over the top with their Bluetooth abilities and leaving people annoyed or should it be regulated more as the airwaves are being ordered un-regulated?
Audiotary Pervasive Relations | Dan | Thought PieThe New Statesman have blogged on how the police are thinking of using Bluetooth. The idea is to Bluetooth gop people close to a current crime scene. The idea being that Bluetooth's short range will only send the 'crime advice video' to those in proximity.
Gopping the underage… | Dan | Thought PieA strange thing happened outside the office last Wednesday. Oceana runs an under 18 night, and out of the blue came hundreds of kids all turned up shrieking and laughing.
So rather than commenting on the youth of today, the price of cheese and other such things, we tried out some Bluetooth gopping with out the support of any Pervasive Relations (P.R). The test also had some different variables to our last gopping experience when we were chased by fanny in town,
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The Comfort of Strangers (in broadmead) | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonWe've been testing our latest game 'The comfort of Strangers' over the last few weeks, with greater and lesser success. We played a great couple of games in broadmead today. There were only six of us playing so we didn't reach the swarm levels we aim for with the game, but as a proof of principal the game was a great success. The most fun was had when we headed indoors to the galleries shopping center. The game made traveling by lift or escalator a thrill. There was a feeling of secrecy, of being hidden in the crowd. There was also the curious experience of silence. OK, broadmead on a Saturday was not silent, but the game acts as a kind of 6th sense. It endows you with the mysterious ability to aurally detect people at a distance. This aural adaptation was the focus of my attention in the galleries today. As the contact is intermittent, the game voice (Jenny Agutter) only pipes up from time to time, leaving the focus of your attention on a kind of silent space of expectation.
I tend to avoid broadmead generally at these busy times. But today these random strangers born of this city did indeed bring me comfort. Today I relished the throng of the crown, the bottleneck at the lift, the gaggle of teenagers and the prams wheedled like charriots. Infact I got to enjoy them all twice. When I got back to the lab, I got to read the bluetooth logs with lists of all the devices encountered during the game, players and non-players. Here are some of the device names that frequently crossed my path: "asbo", "monks babe", "pronged fork", "Iwonka", "MRS Willy", "numba1hustle", "Whats This?", "Am so fly. . .", "Ports", "G@Y", "DeadPoetic" and " k800i". There were more a lot more in fact there were so many that the bluetooth struggled to keep track of them all and connection to others came in bursts(not very good for the game…). There are a couple of alternate technologies we might use for the game to get over some of the drawbacks presented by bluetooth. We will in all likelihood abandon bluetooth now. But in terms of immersion in a cultural soup bluetooth is a winner.
heres a vid
/simonJ
From SMS to mscape games | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonLooking back through the blog I realise there is a bit of a hole in the story of the project. I'll have a go at filling it in now.
Just before the Media Sandbox mid-way event on 31st March we sat down and looked back over the various experiments and trials we had undertaken over the last couple of months. One immediate conclusion was that gaming was a way to study swarming, not the other way round. Our initial goal, on beginning the project, was to try and understand swarm principles in that we might use them in designing street games. In practice, the only way we could assemble large enough groups of participants to test swarm principles was to offer an attractive game experience (something we failed to do with the SMS tests.)
Next we tried to see if we had observed any swarm effects in the games we had run. Our conclusion was that the only time we had observed an actual swarm effect was in Magnetise, an acting exercise where you choose two people and attempt to keep equidistant from them at all times. Here, an individual could control the whole group simply by shifting position slightly.
However, there were plenty of other observations that were relevant. From these established three principles of human based swarming in game contexts. Just to clarify swarming is the behaviour that emerges out of the interaction of individual agents acting autonomously and individually:
- - Game space formula – the relationship between physical space and game population is critical.
- - Tension – game play must entail a risk or a cost. Simply being required to achieve a simple objective (collect points by going to certain locations, for instance) creates linear behaviour, as well as a poor game experience. A risk or cost environment generates feedback within the system, both between players themselves and between the environment and the players.
- - Cooperation threshold – the tension in the above can lead people to consider and enter into cooperation.
Our next step was to come up with some games based upon these principles. Our first idea was a game based on having to keep close to members of your team (benefit), with the need to keep away from members of the other team (cost). This tension creates the necessity for players to cooperate in order to win. We have called the game 'The Comfort of Strangers' and we've published a rule set and video here. We are currently developing this in mscape for play on HP ipaqs.
