Flash game

071212

The point is not that it’s a good game (it’s not) or that it has amazing graphics (it doesn’t), the point is that everything you see has been drawn and animated in code. It’s object oriented and everything. I even did trigonometry on a rhombus! The flash file below is only 2.6KB, which is very nice.

To play the little game, hold down your mouse button and the triangle will follow the pointer. Eat the ‘food’ and your creature will grow a tail. (more…)

ActionScript ftw’s and ftl’s

071210

In the middle of making a flash game for the scripting module, and it’s been a little frustrating. At this point, things are going to descend into a fairly massive rant so unless; a) you’re nerdy enough to understand the title to this post or b) you’d like some insight into the mind of someone who’s reasonably nerdy; you might want to give it a miss. You’ve been warned. (more…)

Gondry and motorola

071208

Edit: I accidentally deleted the start of this blog post during a ’spring clean’. Oops. Unfortunately I have no idea what it said, so just watch the videos instead. In fact, that is probably what it said originally.

Gondry explains his reasons for doing things far better than I would in this interview, which you should watch if you have six minutes to spare:

Both of the videos above are on the mini-site for the advert but it’s a slightly flaky flash site so I’ve grabbed the videos from DailyMotion instead (which is like YouTube, except it’s French).

TomTom vs the London Underground

071206

Says Speedy, Write a 100 word critique on tom tom as opposed to your love of the london map. Well ok, (it’s a diagram not a map, by the way) here we go:

The London Underground system runs to a set schedule; in order to intersect with a train you have to be in the right space at the right time. The diagram will show you the space, but time has been separated out into a timetable. With TomTom, the view moves with you; tracking your movements live, from satellites in space and giving you a constantly updated ETA.

The TomTom gives you a view of the space you are in, but in some kind of myopic tunnel vision (with a slightly threatening Australian accent, at that). The diagram does gives you an overview of the whole system, you can plan to go from A to B and see both represented on the diagram at once.

Typography and code

071206

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about (and talking about, and waving my arms about) typography and how it affects space. Especially Helvetica. Now it’s time to think about making something, so I’m turning the idea and around and looking at how space could affect type.

Chris showed me one of his projects called I-Beam where he negotiated with different groups of creatives (architects, dancers and dyslexics) to design their own typeface. He asked me what kind of typeface a programmer would make, and I had a strange feeling that I already knew the answer to that one. Here’s an R from the Peter Cho’s Typeface composed of pie segments:

{50, 310, 310, 50, 40, 185, 200, 107, 133, 180}

Computer typefaces and made up of a set of points, which are stored as numbers. So all you need to make a typeface (as a programmer) is some numbers and an idea. My idea, is to make a typeface that is affected by a space. And I know a space with a lot of numbers in it. I’m going to use the Arch-OS system in Portland Square to generate a typeface from the live data coming out of the building.

Chris pointed out that if the typeface were just generated the once, it would be frozen in time, and that would be a bit rubbish. So the idea is to update the typeface as the data changes and have the font files updated on the system automatically, so every time you came back to your dissertation, the typography would have changed.

mscapefest 07 at HP Labs

071205

Just got back from mscapefest at the HP Labs in Bristol. It was a two day event about locative media and the mscape platform, which uses GPS and mobile devices to create digital ‘mediascapes’ that are layered over the real world. Also a good chance for some networking (I got three business cards, three!) and free buffet. The teriyaki beef was excellent.

It was a good couple of days, but I’m far too tired to say anything intelligent at this point. Instead, I’ve put together some Match of the Day style extended highlights, delivered via the understated elegance of the unordered list:

• Pervasive gaming; using GPS (and other technologies) to create locative games that can be played away from the screen. It set my ARG senses tingling. Included a very quick example of how to make a game in mscape, which looked far easier than it probably is.
• Audio for locative media; recording and planning methods for engaging people in locative media, without freaking them out (unless you want to freak them out). Binaural microphones sound cool — you stick them in your ears and they record stereo as you’d hear it — and Duncan Speakman, who was running the workshop, reported ‘great success’ with using sub bass audio. He made a woman cry.
• Teriyaki beef; seriously, there was a chocolate fountain and everything.
• Beyond GPS; extending the mscape platform through the use of other sensors. The focus was on proximity sensors (for location fixes when GPS is not available, i.e. indoors) but other sensors including galvanic skin response were mentioned.
• Collaborative mapping; a talk by Steve Coast about OpenStreetMap, which is to maps as Wikipedia is to enclycopedias. Very interesting talk (he’s a good presenter) with lots to think about. And they’ve found quite a lot of the copyright traps on the proprietary maps, there’s one in Bristol called ‘Lye Close’ which is great; the ‘official’ maps have fictional placed on them whilst the wiki map is apparently still lacking a ‘Mordur.’
• mediascape in the dark; we went out to the Watershed in Bristol and then wandered around in a park with some PDAs trying out a few pieces. We found bats and elephants and about twenty metres worth of GPS jitter.

Fin. I must sleep.