Tom and Elley have been off to Lisbon. Here is their story of how they made the Gulbenkian Garden mediascape and demonstrated it to some journalists.
We were asked to present mediascapes to invited journalists and analysts at the HP Lab University in Lisbon, Portugal. So well what better way to show off mediascapes than with a mediascape! We decided to go down a few days early and build a mediascape for them to try out.
We checked out the location and found a very beautiful garden that was
quite close to the hotel where the event was taking place.
The gardens were part of the Gulbenkian Foundation and formed the grounds for a set of museums and other public spaces and as such they were not only rather pretty but full of interesting artefacts, activities and quite a few people.
Our initial plan was to arrive on Friday evening so that we could scout
the area and then start full on mediascape production on Saturday
morning. However due to bad weather over London our flights were delayed
causing to have a very short nights sleep in a Schiphol airport hotel
and then due to general bad luck our baggage was further delayed. This
meant that we did not arrive until mid afternoon on Saturday and our
luggage did not arrive until about midnight on Saturday night.
Considering that we had to demonstrate this mediascape on Tuesday we
were a little tight for time! All we managed to do on Saturday was walk
around the park with an old friend and ex-colleague who now lives in
Lisbon. But without any recording equipment or anything not much was
actually achieved, however a good cup of tea made everything seem much
better.
On Sunday the work started in earnest, we went out to the gardens to
interview people, take photos, take notes and generally get a feel for
what would work and what we could build in the time available.
We were very lucky to be accompanied by the HP Lab University’s local guide, Caetano Correia.
He was a really good guide and told us lots about the Gardens, their history and some great little anecdotes such as how to catch your reflection in some of the ponds or how some of the flowers in the park are actually very poisonous. We also interviewed several people in the park to get a different perspective on what it was like there and to collect more personal opinions, we even found someone who used to live in Bristol.
After we felt that we had collected enough stories and photos (and drunk
some more tea) we went back to the hotel to start editing and cleaning
the audio and sorting, cropping and editing the photos. It’s always
surprising just how long it takes to get raw content into a nice format.
Even though we had collected content, good stories and anecdotes from
all over the gardens, we decided that we would only make a mediascape
that concentrated on one corner instead of the whole gardens. This was
because the journalists would not have enough time to experience the
whole gardens in the demo, and whilst making a mediascape to cover the
whole gardens is easy we did not have enough time to edit all the
content.
So we found a nice little path through one corner of the gardens that
had some great pieces of content associated with it. And set about
placing the content into regions. It was at this point that we hit the
same problem as lots of our users (yes we share your pain), of not being
able to get a good resolution, legal map with all the coordinate data.
We do know this is a problem for lots of people and yes we are working
on it! So what we did for this one was to just make a blank and empty
map and then essentially move all the regions to the right place by
walking the path, a bit like in the Stamp the Mole game example.
This was a little bit fiddly but actually worked really well. After a few goes of testing and tweaking we managed to make a rather good mediascape that triggered in just the right places. To make the new region locations stick we saved them out to a store file. Eventually when we were happy with them we opened up the store file in notepad and copied the coordinates into the region coordinates in the maker.
If we only had a few audio and images we could have used the “my audio and images” wizard as this works in much the same way. You dont need a a map and you walk around to place the regions and then it stores the position.
Our hotel was very close to the park but there was a fairly busy road
junction in between the two and so we ended up bussing the journalists
about a block and a half. To make the process a bit smoother we let the devices sit out in the sun to get a good GPS fix before the journalists came along.
We also played Stamp the Mole and were pleased that we managed to persuade so many people that you had to actually jump on the mole holes to win, it really was a great sight to see so many normally serious adults jumping up and down in a field thoroughly enjoying themselves!
So in the end everything worked out really well.
Gulbenkian Gardens and Stamp the Mole (portable game) are available to
download from the website, so get out there and stamp on some moles*
*no real moles are hurt in the playing of this mediascape!