mscape blog

Just a quick note to say that the slides from the education workshop and other useful stuff has now been added to the forum.

This year we held mscapefest in Belfast and it was exciting and inspiring to see how the community has grown and to hear about the range of projects and ideas that are being developed.  Delegates from Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, USA, Holland, Denmark and Spain gave the conference a truly international feel and the strong attendance and support from the Belfast mscape community gave the event a good buzz and vibrancy.

We were also very pleased to see so many mscape veterans fly over for the conference and sample the delights of Belfast. And there were indeed many delights! First of all the venue for the conference, W5, was a great location with stunning views of the river, docks, city and the surrounding mountains.

Despite the freezing temperatures a few brave souls found time over the course of the conference to try out some of the local mediascapes such as “Letters to America”, “Snakes and Ladders”, “The Lighthouse keepers lunch” and “Peacelines” all of which we hope will be uploaded soon to the website.

And then there was the Irish hospitality,  Kevin Coyle and Brian Lamb of Ulster mediascapes have worked tirelessly to involve government bodies, schools and local community groups in the mscapers story and so the conference was opened by Finance Minister, Nigel Dodds who highlighted the importance of mobile technologies.   We also heard from Bill McCluggage from the Department of Finance who saw the potential of mediascapes four years ago and has been instrumental in sponsoring the Ulster mediascapes program and the mscapefest conference. You can hear Bill and others talking about mscapes on the mscapes Digital Circle podcast. 

After a day of workshops, on Tuesday evening we were treated to talks and demonstrations at the Sonic Arts Research Centre. This culminated in a screening of Brian Cullens’ animated video “Thrice Removed” which featured a 48 channel soundtrack especially designed for the Sonic Lab.

Day two of the conference was a series of talks covering a wide range of mscape projects covering perspectives from art, heritage and education.  It was brilliant to hear of so many different applications, approaches and lessons learned. We will put the presentations on the web site as soon as possible. Ben has already added his workshop materials   – well done Ben!

As ever Vanessa did a great job planning and organising the conference and we are all very grateful to Vanessa and Deb for making it a fun, informative and successful two days. As we look forward to next year we hope to add more streams for advanced topics in addition to workshops and tutorials for beginners. We would also like to give more space for people to show how they have made their mediascapes, share best practice and network. In the meantime the forums are the best way for us all to keep the conversations going and we urge everyone to sign up, share and help one another.

BBC NI Learning have created a brilliant mediascape called the Ghosts of Nendrum. Launched in October it allows you to meet the former inhabitants of Nendrum Monastic Site and complete a challenge. Witty, informative and great fun the mediascape will be a great experience for visitors to the site. You can find out much more including how to get there, what the experience is like and some of the history of Nendrum by following the link.

Over 30 students and staff completed a mediascapes tour of the College of Agriculture Food and Rural Affaires Greenmount campus’s walled garden on the 17^th September.

The Mediascape was created by Ronan Coll of CAFRE with the help of Kevin Coyle and Brian Lamb. Kevin and Brian run the Ulster Mediascapes Network introducing Mediascapes into education and heritage tourism in Northern Ireland.

The walled garden was fully restored for the millennium and is a popular visitor attraction as well an important learning resource for CAFRE horticulture students. It’s a great venue for Mediascapes, the area is large enough for participants to wander freely but confined so that managing devices was not difficult.

The feedback from students was positive with 85% of participants rating the experience as enjoyable and only 2 participants logging any technical issues with the experience.

The design of the mediascapes is simple with interest being created through a quality narrative from Paul Mooney Facility Manager of  the college staff.  Some innovative use of the group function in Mediascapes is used to allow participants to wander freely around the garden triggering content depending on their own chosen route whilst not experiencing a confusing mash up of sounds.

CAFRE plan to use Mediascapes as a learning tool on their 300 hectare site that includes a working farm, nature reserve, golf course and a large glass house complex. Making best use of all the space is a challenge for staff and students and using some sort pervasive media was one of the ideas Ronan wanted to explore, Mediascapes seemed like a great place to start. The walled garden scape is the first part of a year long experiment. Conservation and Environment students will be using the toolkit to build their own Mediascapes as part of their coursework and faculty staff will be making Mediascapes as learning aids for students.

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 don’t 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 mediascapes 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.