NU Grounds – Leapfroglog

Week 153

I totally forgot to post this last week; I’ll blame it on a combination of excellent weather and too much work on my hands. We’re already well into week 154, but to give you a brief overview of what number 153 looked like, let me just say it was more or less divided between:

preparing for and subsequently running a hand full of urban games at the NU Grounds festival in Leidsche Rijn (we had gorgeous weather and a lot of fun, can’t wait to run more)
sitting on a mid-term exam committee at the HKU (exhausting, but when a student nails it, as happened several times, it’s a real treat)

I also attended Kunstgras where a book profiling several creative entrepreneurs in Utrecht (for which I was interviewed) was presented.

That all left me quite spent so I took Monday off. Which, I think, is a first in over 6 months. And now we’re in the second week after my return from Copenhagen. It already seems ages ago since I stepped off that airplane.

Week 152

This was the last week of my stay in Copenhagen. Coming Sunday it’s back to the Netherlands. As usual leaving feels bittersweet. There certainly things I’ll miss about being here, not in the least our lovely apartment in one of the city’s nicest neighborhoods. And the many great cafés. But there’s a lot to be said for being in Utrecht, too. I have so much stuff going on there, it got a bit tiring towards the end managing it all remotely.

So this week…

I went over to Malmö to meet with Dan Gärdenfors at TAT and with Jonas Löwgren at MEDEA. In both cases there is reason for follow-up; it looks like there might be a TAT-Hubbub concept video about pervasive play and mobile UIs on the horizon, and I might come back to MEDEA to do some teaching.
I had a marathon Skype session on wednesday. Talking to all my students who are now nervously prepping for their mid-terms. As well as sessions with Claudia and Karel in preparation of the urban games festival in Leidsche Rijn we’re assisting with.
I lectured (and ran a little playtest of an audience game I’ve been tinkering with) at CIID. Look for a full report and annotated slides at the Hubbub blog, soon.

And now, it’s time to do a few more touristy things and then pack, and head home. The next weeknote will be Dutch flavored again.

Week 151

So, some notes for the past week. They will be very short because there is not much to tell really. It was one of those weeks with a lull in between projects, and also virtually devoid of meetings, today being the exception.

I went over to LikeMind to catch up with my fellow Dutchman Mark, who seems to be doing great, living and working between Copenhagen and London. Not the shabbiest pair of cities.

I also had another chat with the guys running the U-Turm project who seem to be making nice progress with the image tracking side of things and are now really getting into the game design. Which means, as I told them, they need to start iterating on the rules like crazy, doing paper prototype after paper prototype.

Aside from this I’ve been doing some preparations for PLAY, reaching out to creative teams and individuals who I’d like to see be part of the productions we’re going to be running. Getting lots of positive responses so that is great. I also posted some background on the work we’ve been doing so far for this at the Hubbub blog.

Julius and Karel ran a successful second urban games workshop in Leidsche Rijn for Cultuur19 last saturday. We are now gearing up to assist with NU Grounds, a games festival in the same neighborhood where there will be several urban games on offer. That’s going to take place two weeks form now and should be good fun.

The relative quiet this week has allowed me some time to tinker with Processing, particularly the Box2D library that Mr. Shiffman has put together. I’m just making a little silly software toy with that to kind of flex my flimsy programming skills. Nothing special but I might post some screenshots and maybe a screencast later anyway.

And also, I bit the bullet, installed XCode, and had a go at OpenFrameworks, mostly to have a look at some of the Box2D stuff out there that is controlled with OpenCV (a computer vision library). That seems to be a really nice basis for gaming in public space using urban projections and such. I don’t see myself working in OpenFrameworks though, it really is an increase in complexity as opposed to Processing. Still, by messing with it, I can now appreciate it better.

Next week is going to be my last one here in Copenhagen and looks like it’ll be slightly more busy, with another trip to Malmö and a lecture at CIID. After that it’s back to NL. Time really flies.