As part of the British Science Festival this September, myself and several other fizzPOP types are contributing various activities as part of the It’s a Geek’s World event. Entrance is free, but I believe there will be small charges made for some of the kits that you can construct with us and then take home.
Organised by Dr Kate Sugden of Aston University’s Electronic Engineering department there will be plenty of opportunities for you to make things that go blink, beep or ping at the various workshops that run throughout the day. (Sunday 19th September, 10-4, in the Aston Uni Students’ Guild Hall at Gosta Green.)
Registration will get going over on the Geek’s World website in the coming weeks and there’s also a Twitter account to watch at @geeks_world.
Save the date and stand by for more details for what’s shaping up to be a cool day full of things to learn and make!
Warwick Arts Centre: where we discover krill have surprisingly long reaches...
Following on from the initial lab and adventures with electronics, it was time to test evolved game The Bloop with some players and see how it was shaping up as a fun thing to play and entertaining spectacle to watch.
I think we did alright!
2 krill tag a whale after getting it on a classical pincer movement
Krill await a whale about to leave the exclusion zone around the breeding waters
I had several people approach me as I was preparing for the game saying how much they were looking forward to playing it. When asked why, the answers usually related to the ridiculousness of it and how much fun it looked. Considering the game hadn’t been played anywhere yet I consider this pretty good going!
Bloop headwear: perhaps a contributing factor to perceived levels of ridiculousness... (photo courtesy of Marie Foulston)
There were a few issues with a wave of exhausted batteries for the music, but other than that the tech worked well, with only one on-and-off-again required for the sonar goggles. We’re oh so nearly there with the game design but all the major ingredients are in place and what remains are tweakings rather than re-thinks. A big thanks to everyone for their feedback and also to Hide&Seek and Fierce for hosting.
I didn’t get much of a chance to stand back and observe, but I shall leave you with a few short videos to whet your appetite for further iterations of the game. I’m talking all over the second one I’m afraid, because two security guards came up and asked me what was going on and then were curious to find out more. Job done!
If anyone’s got any photos or video from the game that they’d like to share, I’d be very grateful. Give me a nudge with a link in the comments or send me a message.
In practical terms, what this means is that you can come to Warwick Arts Centre (at the University Of Warwick in, er, Coventry) for 6pm and take part in a whole host of games and playful things, for free!
Sonar goggles
The Bloop (set in the deep ocean off the coast of Chile) will be the first public outing of the sonar goggles I have been developing. If you are playing as a whale, you will be using these goggles to navigate the playing space by sound rather than by sight.
There will also be colourful ribbons, inflatable whales and bothersome krill.
Hope you can come and join us for an evening of fun and challenge!
Extremely loud and low frequency, this noise defies explanation. Scientists have yet to identify its cause: we have no knowledge of a creature large enough to make a sound of this type.
Whatever it is, it’s still down there.
Welcome to 50°S, 100°W.
Whales traverse the deep waters off the coast of Chile on their seasonal migrations between breeding grounds and feeding grounds. Relying solely on their instincts and use of sonar to navigate these murky depths, the whales nonetheless perceive that something a little odd is going on around here.
The krill here – normally a tasty snack for the whales – seem motivated with a strong sense of purpose. When The Bloop calls to them they move in unison in a way the whales don’t quite understand and yet intuitively understand should be avoided…
Ant trying out the sonar goggles at fizzPOP yesterday. He said he had very good spatial awareness and could tell where he was in the room, this video was a little experiment with his awareness of where I was.
(If you listen carefully you can hear the different beep patterns the goggles make depending on how close things are to them.)
Following on from last week’s pervasive games lab, some or all of Hide&Seek, Fierce and/or Screen West Midlands awarded me a grant to develop the sonar stuff into a game to be played at the Sandpit event at Warwick Arts Centre this Saturday. (Not quite sure who to thank, but thanks!)
So, it’s been full steam ahead to turn the whale hat prototype into something that will survive a game. Several games. Maybe some of them outdoors in the British summer…
For various practical and arty reasons, the hat has been replaced by goggles. For financial and logistical reasons, the ArduinoRBBB I used in the prototype has also been replaced by a bare bones equivalent on stripboard.
Here’s the finished circuit, the goggles and the first unit being user tested…
There’s still a lot of soldering, spraying and sticking to be done to get ready for the weekend, but several people have used the googles now and I’m really pleased with the result. Join me at Warwick Arts Centre from 6pm this Saturday to experience the game – which is undergoing a similar evolutionary process!
At yesterday’s game lab (a team effort from Fierce, Screen West Midlands and Hide&Seek) I finally got a chance to try out the whale hat I’ve been making. By which I mean I got other people to try it out!
Andy gets to be whale for the first version of the game, unaware that krill Laura is trapped between him and the mirrored wall behind!
The whale hat was conceived in response to Hide&Seek’s call for games relating to the theme of ‘international‘. I wanted to develop a game based around the idea of epic whale migrations, where the person playing the whale navigates around the game space using echolocation.
The electronics that power the whale hat.
Using a sonar range-finder commonly used in robotics, I hooked it up to a RBBB running Arduino code that generates different patterns of beeps depending on how close objects are in front of the hat-wearer: a continuous loop of 4 beeps when there’s something within 50cm; 3 beeps when there’s something within 1m, 2 beeps, 1.5 metres etc
During the game lab I first got a chance to try out the experience of wearing the hat (complete with headphones and blindfold) and then I roped in the other attendees to help me try out some simple game mechanics. The sorts of things I had written down in my notes as things to explore were “finding objects”, “avoiding objects”, “detecting stationary objects” and ” detecting moving objects”.
Kind of a slow-moving version of the arcade game space invaders: the whale (in the hat) can move from side to side and has to try and ‘catch’ the krill (other players) who are approaching steadily.
If I were to try this again, I might try and set the krill off on their journeys with bigger intervals between. As it was though, this was a beautiful visual spectacle with the gradual advance of the krill contrasting nicely with the clumsier movements of the whale!
This time the krill remained stationary and the whale had to move around trying to locate them.
We talked about what might be motivating the krill (we found ourselves using many phrases we hadn’t anticipated using that day!) and also identified that we kind of needed to justify the sonar more. For example, it would have been possible for the whale to have caught the krill just by walking up and down and waving their arms around at random. We also toyed with the idea of limiting the number of grabs per game.
Although the krill aren’t doing much during the game, I love how you can see all the different emotions they’re (silently) going through!
Trying to give the krill a role that couldn’t be performed equally well by a chair. Now the krill are allowed one step per click and have to gather as many plankton (small pieces of paper) as possible whilst avoiding being caught by the whale.
A shift from object detection to object avoidance. Now we’re justifying the sonar and it’s starting to feel more game-like!
The whale has to avoid the er, the whatever they are. The other players are probably no longer krill, but in the absence of any other term we ended up calling them nuclear krill to signify that they were something not very nice.
The whale’s objective is to get from one end of the playing area to the other.
The nuclear krill are trying to block the whale’s progress. They are allowed one step per clap (approximately every ten seconds) and can move across the playing area, but not up and down it.
We also tried a variant of this where the nuclear krill could only move across, until the whale had passed them, at which point they became locked in to a ‘vertical’ line and could then only move up and down. This change was made to try and prevent redundant nuclear krill. Bad things happen when nuclear krill get bored…
If I can get to the stage where I can build a few more whale hats then the next thing I want to try is having multiple whales. We discussed how having one whale trying to get from A to B at the same time as another whale trying to get from B to A would make things more of a challenge for the nuclear krill and would also reduce the problem of redundancy.
So…
Overall I’m happy with the experience of being the whale (another one of those unanticipated phrases!). I like the combination of vulnerability with the almost super-hero power of being able to see by sound.
I love the spectacle of the game as seen by an audience. All of the versions we tried worked well at this and I think slowness and silence could be a really nice contrast within a busy event environment where this could eventually end up.
That leaves the krill. How can I make life for the krill more interesting?
I’ll be spending today at mac workshopping some ideas for a pervasive game involving this prototype sonar whale hat I’ve made.
Prototype whale hat using a sonar range-finder and Arduino processor
Doing a quick bit of online browsing about whale migration beforehand, I came across this and love the image:
Humpbacks Humpback
Winter: warm, low latitude tropical waters (breed and give birth)
Spring/Summer/Autumn: cooler, high latitude polar waters (feed)
Most humpback whales make mammoth journeys every year between their feeding and breeding sites. Because seasons are reversed either side of the equator, Northern and Southern Hemisphere populations of humpbacks probably never meet; those in the north travel towards their breeding grounds in tropical waters as those in the south are travelling towards the pole to feed, and vice versa. [source]
Another post relating to Phase 1 of delivery of an Agent N project designed to inspire creative writing and foster curiosity amongst a group of Y3 and Y4 pupils.
Whilst the pupils were winding up the training camp with a piece of reflexive writing, I took the opportunity to take a couple of them outside for a bit of feedback on the goings-on of the previous two days.
Rather than shoving a microphone in their face, I used some binaural microphones that look like earphones and just wore them around my neck. I’m repeating most things they say because I wasn’t sure if the mic was picking them up or not!
Last week I spent the first 2 of what will be approximately 6 days working with the Year 3 and 4 classes at Bredon Hancock’s Endowed First School in rural Worcestershire.
My brief was initially to “inspire their children and staff to write with imagination, creativity, enthusiasm and confidence”, but this has since (I think in part as a result of conversations at my interview, which I did in role as Agent N) been expanded out to also try and foster a spirit of creativity, experimentation and enquiring minds in a more general sense. Staff and pupils.
I’ve worked on several Agent N projects up until now: immersive experiences taking place over 3-5 days in which the pupils have an overarching challenge to work on and, as a part of this, investigate different areas of the curriculum. Whilst I’ve had enormously positive feedback on the effects of these, I think there’s still plenty of scope for improvement, so with this project I have changed the structure to explore ways in which to hand some of the authorship back to the children. This has resulted in the delivery being split up into sections. Last week was the first of those sections: a 2-day special agent training camp.
Relinquishing some of the design decisions started well in advance of the delivery time in school when I recruited a friend – 8-year-old Agent M – to help me prepare a video for the trainees to respond to.
The message from Agent A requesting that we look at the top secret footage
I wanted a video of an operative in action. The action involved had to be exciting and intriguing, but not so prescribed that the the pupils in school couldn’t come up with a large range of different interpretations. I had a few locations in mind, but the filming was done as part of a weekend away with friends, so even those decisions had to be flexible.
Here’s the result after some basic prompts for Agent M to run with plus a bit of video editing:
I’ve never seen 40 children sat with such rapt attention before!
We played the video a few more times, pausing in places to give the trainee agents a chance to write down any important details or questions in their special agent notepads.
After a bit of discussion to get a general idea of what they thought was going on, the children were asked to write up their reports for Agent A.
A trainee agent prepares their report...
Here are a few excerpts (spellings etc corrected):
In the film there was a girl disguised as a young child. At the start the girl was at an airport. At a machine she got some tickets. The code was AQZP. After she caught a plane and got dropped off at a wood. Why did she feel the tree?
The lady typed in AQZP. She walked up to a plane netting and stopped. The man walked to the plane. The lady ran to a tree and found a bag with a book in it. It might have been a clue. She ran to a farm track and stopped and ran a bit more and stopped again then suddenly pointed at a farm house. She ran down to a beach and crouched down to touch the sand. She was concentrating on the texture of the sand. Then she ran to a castle on a hill. I think she might be an agent on a mission.
She was wearing black and she looked like she was on a top secret mission. She typed into the computer AQZP which looked like a code. She thought carefully about what she was doing as if the time was running out. She recorded stuff in her notepad. She thought carefully about stuff she found and used it to help her. She looked around carefully in case anyone watched. She looks as if the time was running out and she had to go with the flow. She was just guessing and running. She wrote something into the sand. She felt the tree as if the tree had put it there.
Agent Harry's report on the video
On the DVD I think that there was a girl in an airport and she went there. A cash machine or ticket machine and then she looked at the plane and went to a woodland when a plane went overhead. I don’t think she wanted to be seen because she was sneaking. She picked up a bag and ran to the beach and made a sign in the sand. It was something like this [picture of an arrow]. She was disguised as an old gran. She had glasses like this [picture of glasses].
Agent Jemma's report
I think that the code at the beginning was that she was ordering some clues to find where she needs to go next. Next thing she was taking facts about the airport. Trying to get the right plane. Missed the plane. I think that she was undercover because she has glasses and a hoody.
I saw some dead drops that the agent was finding. It was an agent on a mission I think or she was finding information. An agent was on a computer on Flybe. In the corner of the screen I saw a word that was WHSmiths. The agent at the end was a bad agent finding clues about the good agent. I can’t work out why the agent at the end was feeling a tree and feeling the sand. The agent was writing the code AQZP to get permission.
The report from Agent Cara
Ideas from these reports and from other pieces of writing generated over the training camp will be used in the next phase of delivery…
My main area of enquiry is centred around interactions between people and place: often using tools and strategies from areas such as pervasive games and physical computing to set up frameworks for exploration.
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