U-Turm – Leapfroglog

Week 155 & 156

I have some catching up to do with these. What can I say, things got in the way of writing last week’s notes.

These past two weeks I have been pushing to get a new project, codenamed Ebi, off the ground. It is the next step in my involvement with the PLAY project in Utrecht. I’ve put together a team consisting of Alper, Bernard and Simon to build a game that will tie together several other playful things that will take place over the coming months at several Utrecht events. We’ve had our kick-off and are now in the midst of the first sprint, with delivery of a first rough system by the end of next week. Copy is being written, software is being developed and designs are being made. It’s a pleasure to see this ad-hoc team coming together so fast and getting down to business. That takes real skill, in addition to the craftsmanship each brings to the table.

Other than that, project Buta (another codename) started this week, which is a research thing at the new Design for Playful Impact group at the HKU. We’ve been doing field research and have been sketching and prototyping initial ideas. The subject matter is kind of controversial, so I can’t share too much about it, other than that it involves pigs. Yes, pigs.

In between, I dropped by the presentation of the U-turm project, a student project where I acted as advisor on. The demo worked nicely. With some additional work on the game design I am sure it will be a hit in Dortmund. I also attended Layar‘s one-year anniversary event, where several things were unveiled that I had some part in, such as the all-new floaticons.

Looking ahead, I’ll be busy with Ebi for the next month or two and will also have to take some time to move into a new studio, that I will be sharing with FourceLabs in the new Dutch Game Garden on the Neude. Ace location, nice space, can’t wait for that to happen.

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.

Week 149

I’m writing these notes on a train to Malmö for a change. I was there this wednesday and am back again to have a chat at Illusion Labs. I was put in touch with them by Hampus of The Astonishing Tribe, whom I visited on wednesday. TAT’s an interesting group, specialized in the design of innovative mobile UIs. Their Recognizr concept video made quite a splash in AR circles earlier this year. I once gave a lecture on playful UIs at their office and even though nothing concrete is in the works it would be interesting to collaborate some more on that topic some time.

On wednesday I also met up with my friends at InUse, whom I did some work with when I was last in Copenhagen. That project dealt with applications of multitouch in a real-estate project. Over a Lebanese buffet lunch Mijo and I mostly mused on what’s changed in UX consulting land the past few years and how that might develop into the future. We talked about ‘peak complexity’, the internet of things and strategies for designing deeply networked things. Good stuff.

To wrap up that day, I had a surprise meet-up with Karin of Ozma, (again thanks to the awesome connecting powers of Hampus). Ozma is a game design studio working very much in the same spirit as Hubbub, with a focus on “gaming beyond the screen”. It was very encouraging to discover a company that’s been successfully working in this space for the past four years. (And they’re not the only one, in Sweden alone there’s also Fabel, The Story Lab and Grul…) One of the things we talked about is a cool platform they’re developing for urban games that is not GPS-based, but runs entirely on SMS and is therefore very useful for working with target audiences who do not have access to high-end phones (i.e. teens and tweens).

That wednesday I headed back to Copenhagen, my mind suitably blown, as you can probably imagine.

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Other than that I have been enjoying Socialsquare‘s hospitality on the Vesterbrogade. Martin, Magnus and I spent some time hashing out the details of the workshop we’ll be doing and we managed to narrow down the questions we’d like to answer to a manageable set. I’m keen on having part of this project’s output be shareable with the world; in what shape or form we have yet to determine.

My active involvement with Layar has gone on hold for the time being, but at the same time the first bits of my work for Layar are finding its way into the world. They’ve launched a new version of their app, which now supports paid content. (Android is out, iPhone should follow soon.) This was one of the first things I worked on for them, before moving on to stuff that’ll hopefully see the light of day somewhere over summer. Designing the paid content stuff involved dealing with a ton of dependencies on processes behind the scenes. It was an interesting challenge to make it as frictionless as possible. Plus, the mobile payment ecosystem is itself an interesting beast to deal with for a while. I also found myself designing for several mobile platforms at the same time, which can really mess with your head; both Android and iPhone have their own ‘grammar’ of interaction (or more precisely, one of them has something resembling a proper grammar, the other’s is more accurately described as a pidgin). So designing in parallel for both is a bit like speaking two languages at the same time. Confusing, even to a Dutchman.

All this, plus some more Skype calls with my HKU students (remind me to share some details on their work next time), another Skype session with the U-Turm group and the very final preparations for This happened – Utrecht #6 took up week 149.

Week 147

Well, the volcano did mess with my flight. Despite that, I am still writing this from an apartment on Birkegade in CPH, where I’ll be spending the coming 5-6 weeks. Here’s what my workspace looks like:

Traveling here took up the whole of wednesday. We went by train; Utrecht to Duisburg, Duisburg to Hamburg, Hamburg to Copenhagen. They put our train on a freaking boat for a bit. That was different.

So I’ve been settling in. Getting a bike, reconnecting to old haunts, that sort of thing (I was here for a year in 2007-2008).

Apart from that, I’ve been taking care of some last bits of work for Layar, doing some prep for This happened – Utrecht #6 (registration opens Monday!) and talking to my HKU students. I also had a first meeting with a group of MediaLAB Amsterdam students who are creating a playful urban projection for ISEA2010 in Dortmund.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a city to explore.