mscape blog

For my latest adventure around the world with mediascapes I went off to the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s second annual conference, entitled State of the Map. This year the conference was held in Limerick, Ireland - cue an obligatory limerick competition (the winner of which I unfortunately didn’t write down).

For those you haven’t already heard, the driving force behind the OpenStreetMap idea is that the online maps that many people believe are free, such as Google or Yahoo maps, are actually far from that. Yes, you can look at them for free, and can build mashups where your own data is overlaid on top, but you cannot extract the maps images and use them offline in any way, you can’t print them in paper brochure and you cannot add, update, or alter them without falling foul of the licence restrictions all of these sites include. That is, all of them except for OpenStreetMap.

Essentially it’s the wikipedia of online mapping, built using crowd-sourcing - a large-scale online collaboration where anyone can add to the map, or fix errors they find. The way it is done is that people cycle around with a GPS that logs their path, and record the street names, locations of parks, pubs, shops or restaurants they pass using using a camera or pen-and-paper. Back home they upload the GPS log and use one of OSM’s mapmaking tools such as potlatch or JOSM to draw in the streets, paths, & junctions over their route, and enter in the other point-of-interest data.

We first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago but found that the data was so sparse that the maps really were not all that useful. Fast-forward to the present though, and the 46000 registered users have done an amazing job so that the quality of maps in major cities like Bristol is often more detailed and up-to-date than the equivalent Google map.

For example, here’s the centre of Bristol in openstreetmap

and here’s the same area in maps.google.com.

The openstreetmap version has extra details like the footpaths, pubs, car parks, and churches. For those who know Bristol, you’ll also notice that it has the new unfinished Cabot circus development, which included the redirection of several major roads. Even though the roads were changed over a year ago, the current google map doesn’t include this.

At the conference there were a whole series of talks on people who’d been evangelising OpenStreetMap (OSM) in their own countries, Bolivia, Japan, Canada. Cue the oft-repeated scene of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ view of the map data, accompanied by much ooing, ahhing, and applause. Also there were many speakers who were using OSM data commercially, in print such as the WikiTravel press series, or online such as AND (who donated their entire map of the Netherlands to OpenStreetMap).

For my part I gave a talk entitled Pervasive Media and OSM and demonstrated a simple mediascape game in the hotel grounds based on myLocated Quiz Game tutorial in conjunction with OSM map data.

In the talk, I introduced the new mscape version 2.2 which includes integrated OpenStreetMap functionality - so you can use OSM maps in the authoring of your mediascapes. I also talked about how access to creative-commons licensed geographic data enables a wide variety of interesting possibilities, such as using building outlines to generate 3d models of the local environment, for gaming, audio environmental modelling, predicting the accuracy of GPS.

Download the game created for the conference - Kilmurry Quiz

A group of student journalists recently completed an interesting project investigating locative journalism. You can read about their project here including what they did and their conclusions. Great to hear someone else emphasising the importance of audio.

Southbank Centre and various venues across London

‘… combines all my favourite things about games - play, interactivity, performance, cleverness, technology, participation’ - Guardian Gamesblog

A worldwide photographic treasure hunt, a night time chase across London, a wide-game with a difference and flashmob dance like you have never seen it before – the new cultural phenomenon of social games has arrived this summer with the Hide & Seek Festival, a 3 day extravaganza of free games and play, encouraging us to look at our cities – and each other – with new eyes.

The UK’s first festival of its kind challenges Londoners to Find The Fun In Their City, bringing together a wide spectrum of renowned artists from across the world including Blast Theory, Gideon Reeling, Snap Shot City, Coney and Jane McGonigal. The programme is guaranteed to create a sense of fun, wonder and abandon often missing from everyday life and celebrate all the creativity and social interaction that games have to offer…

For full programme and games sign up - www.hideandseekfest.co.uk

Featured mscapes at Hide & Seek:

Timehole
By Jon Williams and Hazel Grian, Licorice Media
Spirits from the past are entering our world through a mysterious “Timehole”. Help world famous Paranormal Investigators Pat and Dave lay these spirits to rest

Stamp the Mole
After placing three mole holes stamp on ten moles to win. The moles run away more quickly each time you stamp on one so don’t take too long!

Always Something Somewhere Else
By Duncan Speakman
Interwoven stories connect you to remote locations around the world, soundtracked with a generative music score. Touching on climate change and global awareness.

Or sign up for Simon & Simon’s Comfort of Strangers, a a street game that uses ipaq PDAs, mscape software and adhoc wifi networks to create a series of social encounters driven by risk and common interest.

Posted for Vanessa Bellaar Spruijt

 Heres a blog post from Constance on her recent mediascaping in Mull.

In May I spent a lovely sunny day on the Isle of Mull, meeting a group of teachers who are working on mscape projects in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland. Emma Faragher who is the NLS’s Education & Outreach Officer  for the John Murray Archive had set up a pilot project last year with two teachers, Heather from Ulva Primary, and Julia from Dervaig Primary, and this year all the schools on Mull are starting to get involved.

The project encouraged schools to learn about guidebooks and tourist travel guides, research their local area and create their own guide, but as a mediascape.

So  I spent a day at Ulva Primary school, running through the basics of mscape with a group of teachers. Then to test out the mscape previously made by the Ulva pupils we had to head down the road to the ferry, and over to the Boathouse for lunch. Trying out the start of the Ulva mscape was a great way to get the new teachers to understand what mscapes are about. And it was a great excuse to spend a sunny hour eating fresh food and looking at the scenery. I did walk about a bit on Ulva itself, testing out a bit more of the scape. Its quite a walk – 6 miles round, the ‘Livingstone Walk’ is based on an existing walk on the Isle of Ulva, giving information on its history, geology and island life today.

Dervaig primary school created a driving tour for the road between Tobermory and Dervaig, but I didn’t get a chance to try that one out. I’m hoping to go back and see how the other schools have got on, and spend some more time being guided around the Islands by the voices of the children.

 

Most of the schools are tiny, one of the pilot project schools has 8 pupils,  the other 12, which means that the whole school will probably be working on the projects. This carries its own problems – if the school has no children in the higher years then the teachers will be working with quite young age groups so may not be able to rely on the children being able to use computers quite so confidently. One way round this may be to involve older pupils from the local secondary school. There is also a new curriculum in Scotland which seems to fit very well with the way that mscapes can be developed as cross curricular projects. I came home wishing that my own children could be in Heather’s school, with that landscape and her dynamic approach to education.

 On a technical note, the schools have been trying out different GPS enabled phones – we are still looking for what is the best solution for schools based mscapes – something that doesn’t slip out of small hands would be good. Any ideas welcomed!

 Ffi:             e.faragher@nls.uk constance@featherhouse.com 

You can also read more about the project in this news article and press article.

 

This year I was lucky enough to be asked to give a half-day tutorial at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco - a gathering of the world’s greatest minds in the field of online mapping all in one place.

My tutorial session was entitled Beg, Borrow, or Steal: Make a Simple GPS Game.  The idea behind the name was that if you want to make a GPS game you can steal a game mechanic from an existing game - be it of the video, board or playground variety - borrow code and media from other ’scapes on mscapers.com, and beg your friends to help you playtest it out in the world.

 

The session, aided by ex-mscapers Kurt and Patrick, was split into three sections - a presentation part, a live mscape creation demo, and a chance to play the mediascape that was created.

The presentation took the 40-strong audience through a brief history of GPS gaming, showcasing some of the most interesting examples (including the Roku’s Reward video - which has been uploaded to youtube), and introduced the stages involved in designing and testing a GPS game.

 

 

The attendees themselves then split off into groups to design and storyboard their own GPS game ideas - this was a lot of fun!  There were some great ideas there, including a located version of the old arcade game QIX (draw shapes with the GPS to capture opponents enclosed within) and a ‘freemuim’ version of the Stamp the Mole game where you could upgrade from a standard free ‘foot’ avatar to the diamond-encusted stilletto by spending real money!

 

 

Next up, I took the attendees through the process of designing and building the  Stamp-the-Mole game using the mscape tools from start to finish. An important point made several times was the importance of testing out in the real world - don’t spend all your time making great content, make something simple using scratch content and try out your core mechanic   (what your player spends most of the time actually doing) before you go any further.  To make the point, I built entirely new scratch content in 10 minutes using MS Paint and the built-in voice recorder in windows.

 

Would you believe that these images were created in 10 minutes? Yep, me too.

 

Finally at the end of the session we took everyone outside to a path of grass between the bay and the carpark to play the game that wejust created

 

 Attendees playing the Stamp-the-Mole game

 

If you’re interested you can download the slides, scratch content, and the simplified stamp the mole game from the mscapers help pages at http://wiki.mscapers.com/bin/view/Main/Where20

 

The Sky Remains detective agency are looking for recruits to help solve its first major case - a baffling mystery set in the Sixth Dimension. A series of online puzzles will test your wits  but dont worry you are not alone. Other members are also working on the case and there are a number of forums and web sites that can give you clues and help you on your way. Once you have solved the first set of puzzles and rise through the ranks from Rookie detective to Silver badge there are a series of geocaches and mscapes for you to complete. Agents worldwide are waiting for the remaining geocaches to be found so please do join the quest and see if you might be close to one of the remaining caches.

The Sky Remains site has been developed by Licorice Film to act as a gaming hub where players can add their own cases to an “X-files” style filing cabinet. Cases can be mediascapes, online puzzles or geocaches. So if you have a mediascape quest or game that you would like the agency to work on please do add it to the case files.

We had been alerted in the mscape forums to an exciting new project called “10 Seconds” that combined a film, a website and a mediascape in a detective mystery plot. I was keen to try it out although after watching the trailer I was too scared to try it out on my own in the dark and so I persuaded Ben and Vanessa to come along with me, put our detective hats on, and solve the mystery. We had all watched the film and so we knew basically what the story was about. When we got to the park we loaded up the mscape and followed the instructions, which were pretty good, although of course because we were doing it on a bright sunny day it was really difficult to read the screens and see the map.

 

We attached a speaker to one of the devices so that we could all hear and share the experience, again this is not really the right way to become immersed in the plot but it did make it fun and embarrassing at the same time. It was embarrassing because the messages from the Detective Inspector that came through load and clear had very strong, colourful language which we had to make sure did not reach the ears of the many toddlers playing in the park!

The mediascape had some wonderful magic moments. When we went out on to the road to inspect the scene of the hit and run we were told about a white car that was seen speeding away from the scene – could this be that same white car?

 

Also as we walked around the park replaying interviews with witnesses we heard about people playing Frisbee and a camera person – were these those same people?

  

It was tiring work pounding the beat and interviewing suspects and so like all good detectives we stopped to get a muffin!

After a lot of head scratching, exploring and trying to piece together the situation we managed to complete the mission. But things in that park would never appear the same again!

 

Congratulations to Ben Roberts for creating an experience which starts to bring alive all the great potential in mediascapes and for connecting an online plot so well to a physical experience.

Here’s a blog post from Vanessa.

Last week a team of experts from a range of fields (including me and Richard) came together in London at Channel 4. The receptionists had walked straight out of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and Richard and I, with our humble researchy HP flair were not entirely sure whether we could handle all the excitement and chaos in this hip media environment. We were escorted through an office where everyone had a computer screen as well as a TV monitor and delivered to a meeting room…It must have been the most densely packed room I have ever been in for a normal meeting. We were there to pick the top five best ideas for the ‘Exploded Narrative mscape challenge’ as part of b.TWEEN08. We were packed in like sardines and we had a lot of ideas to weigh up! Luckily everyone was very pleasant.

As some of you may know the fourth  b.TWEEN festival site has gone live over the past month offering an exciting programme spread over the 19^th and 20^th of June at the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester, England. b.TWEEN is a unique cross media gathering where interactive ideas are seeded, shared and sold. It uses technology in innovative ways and radical formats to deliver cutting edge, interactive events with networking and business at their core.

As part of their program they are running various challenges and competitions and one of them is ‘Exploding Narrative’ . People were urged to think about innovative ideas for mscapes, which would have to engage with location-based collaborative gaming, learning or stories. They only had 150 words and an image to express their ideas! Applicants were strongly advised to focus on content rather than technology at this stage. The 5 top-rated ideas will receive a £1000 pitch development grant and a day at the Pervasive Media Studio here in

Bristol where they get a chance to discuss their ideas in depth with a team of mscape specialists. The contestants will develop their idea into pitch and present to an industry expert panel in front of an audience at the

ICA on the 10th June which will steam them ready for the opening event of b.TWEEN08 on 18 June. This is where the proper voting begins…not only will they pitch at b.TWEEN, it will be screened across London, Liverpool and

Manchester as well as online. Delegates and members of the public will vote for which idea should win a £10,000 to develop their pitch into a finished mscape.

So, who are the lucky five? It was an interesting, tough and useful afternoon, and we battled through the various games, stories, learning tools and virtual tours to finally come up with the following five:

• Super Scurry - Robin Shackford
• Our Music, Our City - Ben Dalton
• The Detective - Ben Minton
• With You - Hazel Grian
• Riverains - Martin Rieser

These are very different entries by a range of artists from completely different fields making it more interesting and harder to choose. The pitch will be everything…stay tuned in!

I spent a very inspiring day in

Belfast last week where I got to hear about some of the interesting mscape projects that the schools are doing. Despite the difficulty of making time in the busy curriculum the schools have embraced the opportunity to use mscape as a teaching tool.

In St Patrick’s in Dungannon a year nine class have been creating a mediascape on the site of an old battle. They chose to recreate the Battle of Yellow Ford and it has given the students an opportunity to research the history of the site, design the mediascape and recreate the ambience and sounds of battle.

Another school, St Pauls in Bessbrook stands in the shadow of Slieve Gullion and the year ten class collected information, pictures and sounds associated with the mountain and the surrounds and then used them to create a series of movies which were enacted by the pupils dressed in period costume. The movies would then be located around the vicinity.

At Termoncanice the year seven class decided to re-tell the story of “The Lighthouse Keepers lunch” with pictures, music sound and visuals. To help design the flow of the story, how it might be broken down into regions, what each region should contain and where they would be placed, the teacher created a large paper map of the school.

Each region was represented as a little booklet with pages for the artwork, storyline and list of media items.

The pupils drew the pictures and these were scanned to create digital images to be used in the final mediascape. This tangible map really helped the teacher involve the whole class and help them understand the idea of mapping a physical space with a virtual overlay. The booklets are a tangible representation of the digital media items in the mediascape. The painted map could highlight areas that the pupils were familiar with. It was a really great way to visualise the space and the idea of mediascape.

The Templepatrick Primary mediascape is centered on the grounds of the College of Agriculture Food and Rural Enterprise (CAFRE) where the pupils go to explore the world of mini-beasts. Pupils explore designated areas of the CAFRE campus and the mediascape guides them through the identification of insects and beetles that they find.

The workshop itself was held at Peatlands Park, a country park run by the Environment and Heritage Service (EHS). We were treated to a ride on the Peatlands Park train around the grounds of the park.

On our trip we were entertained by Colin, the assistant warden, who told us all about the history of the park and the bogs. I was particularly intrigued to hear of the sport of Bog Snorkeling and as I gazed into the murky, boggy water I could not understand how anyone would want to do it!

The park are keen to try out a mediascape to augment the train ride, I am keen to see how it progresses.

I have just got back from the CHI2008 conference in

Florence where we ran a “Designing Location Based Experiences” course. As part of the course we developed a demonstration mediascape for participants to try out. It was an interesting development process. I was working with Duncan Speakman who is an audio artist with expertise in creating mscapes. As Duncan planned to arrive at the conference at a later date than me we thought a nice theme for our mediascape was “Anticipation” with my thoughts on the space and what Duncan would make of it when he got there and what kind of sounds he would imagine would work well there.

 

I used the map service to get a map of the general area and then I walked the grounds tracking my GPS route in a rough mediascape. I could then use these GPS traces to see how well GPS was tracking and create a more detailed map of the area from a photograph of the map of the grounds.  As I walked around the grounds I recorded my observations about the place for

Duncan and I also took photographs of places that I thought would make good regions. I then added these regions to my mediascape and made each region simply show the related photograph.  I then emailed

Duncan the raw recordings that I had made along with the mediascape so that he could choose, process and edit the recordings and add his own voice over and ambient sounds. He developed the piece so that it was like a phone call from him to me and him arriving at the conference venue. For a ten minute demo and a couple of days work we were quite pleased with the final result.

 

We had a couple of great student volunteers, Patti and Arianna, who helped us run the course and they were able to take people out, give them the iPAQs and let them try out the mediascape and we got some nice feedback from some of the participants. Thanks guys we could not have done it without you!

 

You can always download and try out the mediascape on the tester if you are curious and can’t get to

Florence!