Category: Links

Some pretty disturbing news from Sweden about youth gangs. (If you like me don’t read Swedish, Google does a pretty good job of translating this.) The article posits that the way kids get caught up in these gangs is through abusive games such as ‘slave deck’ but I think that is taking it too far. If there’s any play at work here, it’s young people mimicking the dog-eat-dog world of business. That might be a cynical reading of this piece, but there you have it. More likely than some evil ruleset subverting kids into becoming mafiosi.

“URBLOVE is a service that in an innovative way combines urban exploring and games, with user-created content. It is both a service for location based mobile games mainly in urban areas, as well as an online community where these games are distributed. On the web community users can create their own games and share their experiences with each other.” I had a chat with one of the girls behind Ozma recently and what I liked the most about the platform they’re building is the decidedly low-tech approach they’re taking. Urblove is text message driven, making it very accessible to young people who tend not to carry around iPhones and the likes.

“A wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn.” An idea that has been floating around the labs finally finds it way onto the market. Interesting.

A time tracking tool that is controlled by stacking wooden pieces. I’m working on a game design involving stacking physical stuff so this was intriguing to see. I like the aesthetic of the thing, although I am slightly doubtful of its utility.

“Back in 2006, early on a Saturday morning, artist Julien Berthier installed a new door in the city of Paris—but it was a fake door, leading nowhere, on an otherwise empty wall in the 3rd arrondissement.” Entertaining musings on in-between spaces, fake facades and urban labyrinths. Put me in mind of the Miéville novel I read recently.

The film of the Playmakers project, which chronicles the creation of a pervasive game by Alex Fleetwood and Holly Gramazio is now available online. It’s really nice to see the design process of a game demystified like this. There are also some nice reflections on pervasive games in general.

Ichi Face is “a new twist on a real classic, and it gets people scrutinising and meeting each other in an exciting and unusual way.” It’s essentially bingo with chopped up photo portraits. I love the look of the contraption where participants get their photo shot and also the quirky look of the print out materials.

“Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.” I’d be interested in donning this crazy contraption to experience life from a third person perspective in real time.

A pretty comprehensive (although slightly US-biased) overview of the history of location-based games. The last Area/Code example Kati London briefly discusses is of most interest to me because it deal with situated, applied game design.

“I don’t play videogames because I want to have competent, professional militaristic encounters with friends. I’d take Dangerous Mistakes In The Company Of Friends over competence any day. Sure, they may be mistakes, but they’re dangerous! They’re exciting! And sometimes, they make the game better than it ever could be when you play it “right”. I wouldn’t want it any other way.” It’s great how Tom manages to describe a hilarious episode in a Left 4 Dead session so well, it had me laughing out loud.

It as a real pleasure to be involved with two recent events that The Mobile City was at, too. This report is a nice reflection on both of them from people who have been thinking abut this urban computing stuff for longer than most.

“The EyeWriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies. It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.” Well-deserved winner of the Prix Ars Electronica.

“By sloshing, squishing, pulling, punching, etc, in a tub of mud (yes, wet dirt), users control games, simulators, and expressive tools; interacting with a computer in a new, completely organic, way.” Mud, I wonder how that idea came into being.

This looks incredibly useful. Too bad I didn’t have it at my disposal while at Layar.

Had a chat with some of the guys behind this company at ThoughtMade. They showed a bit of patterned foil that you could print and stick on a regular screen, making it work with their digital pens. A cheap way (compared to Wacom’s Cintiq, for instance) to make big screens with pen based interactions.

Ran into the people behind FIELD last friday, who were in Copenhagen to present this video that was commissioned by Netfilmmakers Gallery: “In their video Muse, FIELD is remixing their private digital scrapbooks from the last 3 years. A flood of inspiring images and references is transformed into an ocean of colour, fuelled from Evernote, our blog field.io/process, our favourites on Google Reader and Flickr, and other sources.”

“”The use of certain products, such as kites, mountain bikes and GPS monitors, has a bearing on the way in which landscape is understood.” The landscape is instrumentalized, we might say, distilled through dense layers of technological abstraction to become, once again, a place inhabitable by human activity, however pathetic or impressively persistent it might be.” Which more or less sums up what I find so fascinating about working in new urban development areas such as Leidsche Rijn. To see if there are ways to transform in between spaces into social places for play.

“The New Weird has come into being, such as it is and whatever it should be, on its own and not by dint of any decision or program, so the attribution of decisions and schemes to it ought to be seen as prescriptions rather than as descriptions.” This passage, from a slightly confusing essay on the contemporary literary fantasy scene, got me thinking about discussions about interaction design and this exact kind of confusion that often happens. People expressing a hope or a wish about it, but presenting it as an objective fact. Whereas, for instance, what we are trying to do with This happened is to just show the work and in doing so, just describe what is going on.

A clever little Processing project that lets you paint with light.

““One free interaction” is a prospective design pattern that gives software and hardware a more humane feel. It exists outside of task flows and the concept of users as task-doers. Instead it sits in the “in between” spaces, suiting users as fidgeters, communicators, and people who play with things.” Nice to see champions of utilitarian design embrace playfulness in interfaces. I’d go further than encourage just one interaction that is slapped on and suggest it should be one of the aspects that is baked into the design. A first principle.

Alper’s notes on This happened – Utrecht #6 in soundbite form. Really captures the spirit of the thing. (Too bad Haas got left out.)

Another report on our last edition of This happened – Utrecht, this one focusing mostly on Keez Duyves’s talk.

“We can imagine leading school buses of children to observe a road cut, revealing the strata of various epochs: Eocene, Oligocene, late Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene, and, now within the Holocene, the military lamina.” I don’t know what to make of this (is this supposed to be from the future?) but I loved reading it.

“Each school summarises the statistics in straightforward, natural English. There are well over 20,000 state schools in England that we do this for. We got a computer to do the work. A journalism robot.” Lovely work from the guys at BERG. I’m curious to see how they’ll decide to commercialize this.

“After accidentally wiping out the whole human race, hero Ben and his sidekick Dan go back in time to stop coathangers being invented and, in turn, allow Hitler to take over the world with his army of Nazi dinosaurs.” A must-play, in other words.