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Snacks, Aardvarks and ideas: media sandbox update event | Clare Reddington | News30 people gathered in the studio tonight to share ideas, progress, tapas and beer at a Media Sandbox event. Designed to update the community on how projects are getting on, the event also served as an opportunity to extract knowledge from the gathered crowd of innovation, web, TV, mobile and social media people.
"Mobile networks were actually built originally to carry voice. People forget this" Sam Machin, Orange
Nomos Media kicked off with an overview of how their AudioEnable mobile podcasting platform is progressing (so far easier than they expected). They are using the .NET compact framework for development, initially just for Windows Mobile as it is the schools' platform of choice. Having cracked basic functionality with a test device, the next phases will include file management, compression, upload and editing functionality (potentially the more difficult bits). Richard Hull from HP Labs and Sam Machin from Orange jumped in with some technical questions around encoding and Brian Condon asked the Audioboo in the corner question. Part of the discussion was around the user need to upload recordings 'made in the field'. Could they be uploaded later? Could the application instead use telephony to dial and record straight to a server (cue Sam's brilliantly dry comment). In the wider project, Radio in Schools is still being taken up rapidly across the UK, with schools using it to create audio newsletters to parents, communicate with twin schools in India and record school plays. "We created a platform and they are running with it".
"Stunningly we have made one sale already. And they jumped through many hoops to do it"
Next came Calum Lasham from Street Art Dealer who opened with an explanation of QR codes, lamenting the lack of UK uptake in both QR and mobile micro-payments. One of the aims of this project is to spread the gallery across the city; enabling artists to sell their work directly and cut out the middleman. As QR can encode a lot more information than a normal bar code and you can lose 70% of an image and still scan it, they are perfect electronic price tags for the street. Having sold one print already, they are planning a test installation with an unmanned gallery in Broadmead, but still have many challenges around the lack of parity in scanner quality across phones (I rate Optiscan for the iPhone), trust and payment mechanisms.
At this point we took a break and I conducted some 'special' research of my own, ripping and crumpling QR codes to see just how robust they are. My very scientific study says crumpling is fine, ripping and putting back together is sometimes not and you can lose rather less than 70% and not have a chance of reading anything. But I still think they are good.
"Big brother and Crimewatch are the most success interactive TV formats ever"
When Rik Lander started the Viral Spiral Sandbox project, he proposed to investigate how the passive nature of watching TV could be combined with the many types of interaction made possible by computers and the internet. Rik discussed how many of the TV production people he had discussed his ideas with had expressed dismay at the idea of creating a live, interactive programme; outside of the rather crass output of Channel 5 quiz programmes, the two worlds rarely meet. Rather than starting from thinking about formats, Viral Spiral is looking at what may or may not work for audiences (both those who do and don't want to interact), testing studio-based games which utilise audience interaction through things like search and messaging, the project will then develop TV formats, depending on success. Rik gave an overview of their first test session (described in his blog here) and asked his Tricky interactive question of the week: is there an inverse relationship between audience participation and quality? Rik then employed the community brain with some technical questions around the search and ARG type audience tests he is planning next.
This seemed to be a good opportunity for me to try out Aardvark for the first time, a new social network which enables you to IM questions and get live answers from your network and beyond. So, I instant messaged out Rik's question "what is the standard delivery time for an SMS?" And this is the chat transcript of what came back:
17:47 Aardvark: Got it. I'll find someone in your network who knows about *consumer electronics* , and send them your question now. I'll send you an answer in a few minutes!
17:49 Jose L./25/M/Venezuela: 3 seconds, more or less.
17:50 clare reddington: Thank you. Does it depend on traffic?
17: 54 Jose: It depends on how far are you from the closest cell (antenna). the closest, the better transfer rate you'd get. Of course It is all theoretical, in practice there's more variables to consider.So there, not sure how useful Aardvark was, but a great event with lots of chatting, snacking and useful interjections. Thanks to all who attended.
New York New York! | Simon Evans | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonWe're putting the finishing touches to Comfort of Strangers before it's outing at Come Out & Play festival in New York in early June. Ok, we're ironing out the bugs that made the game frustrating to play at the Media Sandbox Showcase. There is some urgency here as the game is opening the festival on June 6th.
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.
Final Showcase But A New Beginning | Simon Evans | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonThe Media Sandbox Final Showcase event was a great opportunity for us to trial the game with the numbers of people for which it was intended but the scale threw up some issues. Some of these were pretty straightforward and to do with device management – keeping 40 devices charged, making sure the game mscape didn't crash out waiting for players to begin – others were more interesting.
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.
From SMS to mscape games | Simon Evans | 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.
