Category: Links

“Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player.” Handy. The demos cover a pretty broad range of displays.

An urban infoviz installation. Certainly a relief from all those big screens, but it’s hard to tell the output from random noise. It would have been nice if a little bit more context was provided in the set-up.

“Night of the Cephalopods is a survival horror game with old school pixel art graphics and an innovative fully voiced dynamic narrative system.” Must play this next time I launch Windows on my Mac.

This post contains a video of Daniel Cook’s presentation at a recent IxDA event. This is a good introduction into the concept of exploratory learning, somtehing games do really well. Dan also explains his skill chain model, which he now dubs STARS – for Skills, Tools, Activities, Rules and Stimuli.

More notes taken at Playful, these are by Elin. She writes: “To me, the most interesting talks revolved around the notion of “freeplay” – the bit of the user experience that can’t be designed or controlled by designers in advance.”

A short piece by Gibson on the nature of science fiction. “I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any “future” I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into “worlds” (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be “the future”.”

A wonderful image collection of old board games, with some interesting links to history articles at the end. Via Tom.

Guess I’ll need to go and make one of these some time soon so I can use a Wiimote in a personal project.

Extensive notes taken at Playful: Game Design London 2008 by Roo Reynolds.

A nice collection of web interface sketches.

“It shows a 2D plot of genetic similarity across Europe, colour-coded by country, alongside a political map of Europe using the same colours. A simply striking way to illustrate the complex process of reducing a multi-dimensional data set.”

A product that employs active RFID and an accelerometer to essentially turn your pet dog into a proto-SPIME. I need this. But first, I need a dog. Also, apparently only available in the US at the moment. Sigh.

“But look around the restaurant some time (discreetly) and see your fellow citizens in action — mostly minding their own business, enjoying privacy while seldom having to enforce it, needing no screens or vigilant authorities to protect them, or to make them behave. Privacy is good! And, guess what? It happens when we empower people to see.”

“Ubiquitous surveillance programs that affect everyone without probable cause or warrant […] foster control. And no one is safer in a political system of control.”

“…I think people will perform better when understanding the theoretical constructs in which they operate, so they can appreciate self-imposed arbitrary limits that may not have realized.” Not to mention the philosophical underpinnings of those theoretical constructs.

“A laptop scans the room using the open source Roomware software. It connects to random visitors and searches the Last.fm database for similarity. It then shows the similarity on a big screen by showing the profiles. A percentage and five artists both have in common.”

Fun talk and demo by Jury Hahn of MegaPhone, who do “Phone Call Controlled, Realtime, Multiplayer Gaming on Big Screens”. Nice to see a gaming presentation where the audience actually gets to play.

“Being playful means that some of the APIs we publish may not be useful to a large audience, but they will be fun. And, in the end, isn’t that what the web is all about?”

“Voor een eerste This Happened Nederland was het een geslaagde avond met overwegend solide presentaties, […] die verder goed was georganiseerd.”

“Concluderend kan ik zeggen dat ik met name hele inspirerende verhalen gehoord heb deze avond. Ook de afwisseling in onderwerpen was erg prettig. Het maakt niet uit welk type project het is – we gingen van games naar fysieke elektronica naar handmade crafts naar Mac applicaties – hetzelfde type issues komt bij allemaal terug.”

“Het was al met al een mooie mini-conferentie met inspirerende praatjes en een goede interactieve sfeer. Het leert dat het ontwerpen voor interactie aan de ene kant zeer breed is, en dat een interessante case nog niet wil betekenen dat er ook gedegen werk achter zit.”

Sketches superimposed on final pages (mostly of the lovely Vimeo, it seems).