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.