I was at Game Camp 08 on Saturday. It was held in Sony’s 3Rooms building near Shoreditch which is amazing. Imagine your dream flat, but full of rather more PS3s and PSPs than you could ever need. That said, the Sony branding wasn’t actually overpowering, and the venue was a very good choice.
The day was held in the style of a barcamp, with sessions run by participants. There were sessions on ‘How to play Doerak, a semi-russian card game’, ‘ARGs, are they f****d’?', ‘Playing SLorpedo (mixed reality naval warfare in Second Life)’, and many many more.
Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian organised the event and has since written up a conclusion as well as a quick review of one of the busiest sessions, Matt Biddulph on ‘hacking game controllers with Arduino’.
A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities
I can make Blogjects now because the semantics are immediately legible — objects, that blog. Tonight, I can go into my laboratory and begin to experiment with what a world might be like in which I co-occupy space with objects that blog.
Blogjects track and trace where they are and where they’ve been;
Blogjects have self-contained (embedded) histories of their encounters and experiences
Blogjects always have some form of agency — they can foment action and participate; they have an assertive voice within the social web.
The last point is important, and while he’s not expecting them to pass the Turing test, they need to interact. Good bloggers don’t ignore their comments; thats where most of the fun happens. In the same way, blogjects participate and converse both between themselves and with us.
The significance of the Internet of Things is not at all about instrumented machine-to-machine communication, or sensors that spew reams of data credit card transactions, or quantities of water flows, or records of how many vehicles passed a particular checkpoint along a highway. Those sensor-based things are lifeless, asocial recording instruments when placed alongside of the Blogject. … The social and political import of the Internet of Things is that things can now participate in the conversations that were previously off-limits to Things. … Things, once plugged into the Internet, will become agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on” matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal
matters.
If a blogject is an object that blogs, a tweetject is clearly an object that tweets (an intransitive verb: the act of using Twitter).
There are already lots of examples of objects using Twitter to interact with people, usually to report about the state of things in a convenient form. Botanicalls is an interesting project, aimed at “enhancing person-plant communication” using tools that can be used by people as well as plants. As a result, Pothos is a plant that knows when it needs watering (learn how to make your own).
Gareth Jones wrote about getting his laptop to tweet when Bluetooth devices come in and out of range. For a while that script was updating as gareth_laptop on Twitter. As long as some relevant mobile phones and laptops have Bluetooth enabled, there are some useful and interesting elements of personal presence detection here. Who is nearby? With some additional second-order agents running to work out what these devices are and what they mean (is Gareth at home? If he’s at work, who is nearby?).
Andy Stanford-Clark has an impressively complex home automation setup in his house on the Isle of Wight. It’s been online for a few years already, but has more recently been exposed via Twitter as andy_house. (Although Kelly raises bots as one of her Twitter pet peeves, she makes an exception for Andy’s house.) Andy also Twitter-enabled the Red Jet ferries which go to and from the Isle of Wight, where he lives.
There are many more, and lots more will no doubt be added this year. Currently, most Twitter bots are one-directional. Things will get really interesting when more of them converse as well as simply report.
Everyware by Adam Greenfield is relevant, though it deals mainly with the near-term. Andy Piper has a review which you might find helpful.
OpenSpime is a project to enable “individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors”. Read Tish Shute’s introduction on UgoTrade too.
Not long before leaving for SXSW, I had posted some some thoughts and notes about ‘the backchannel’. The timing turned out to be pretty good, since the talk within and around SXSW became pretty much all about the various uses of backchannels during the conference. Twitter (which was discovered by many people at SXSW last year) is the obvious one, but there was the official Meebo chat rooms set up for each panel, plus thousands of blog posts. Cote flatteringly described my post as prescient, but it was only accidentally so. It was really something more like coincidence mixed with common sense.
I’m particularly glad to have this wonderful resource because I missed the keynote. Our panel was unfortunately scheduled at the same time, but turned out to be quite a different beast. We displayed the official Meebo chat on-screen, for all to see. Dan Heaf, our moderator, took questions from the floor early and often, while several of us were reading and responding to the backchannel chat while it was happening, and weaving it into the panel as we went. The biggest problem was a fairly noticeable lag on the Meebo messages, but I’m very glad we put it up onscreen. It takes courage, and it’s probably easier for a panel than an individual to pay enough attention to it to get the most value from it, but it is something I would do again in an instant.
For the first time in my life, I used a Skype video call with my wife today as an ambient backdrop to life, rather than just as tool for having a conversation.I’d always wanted to try it, ever since hearing my friend and colleague Dave Newbold mention, in a presentation he was giving a couple of years ago about the near future for technology and social interaction, something he’d heard described as ‘ambient Skype’, whereby people leave a voice client running in the background while they are away from home as a way of being almost-there.
Where the marginal cost of bandwidth is at or near zero, you don’t have to constantly talk to make use of realtime online communication tools. You can relax and enjoy being in each other’s company, as you would at home. A bit like Leisa Reichelt’s term, Ambient Intimacy, but less about easily staying loosely in touch with many people, and more about actual intimacy between two people by using a (normally) synchronous tool in an undirected way.
Time zones have often made it difficult in the past. I’m in the US and Rachel is back in the UK, our lives don’t overlap much, and we have to make an effort to find times we’re both online, or revert to text and email. Today though, I had some free time in the late afternoon and badly needed a nap. Since it was early enough to coincide with Rachel’s bed-time, we tried falling asleep together, apart.
I found this to be very comforting. It’s rather reassuring to drift off with the familiarity of hearing each other breathing and (for me) the everyday noises of home in the background. A nice way to reduce the distance during a long trip abroad. I don’t know why we didn’t try it sooner.
Jane McGonigal gave a wonderful keynote on games and ARGs. Not dissimilar to her ‘Reality is Open’ presentation at GDC recently, so these are not her SXSW slides, but there’s an overlap.
During the keynote, Jane mentioned that as part of playing an ARG, she had witnessed (and learned) the Soulja Boy dance, and offered to perform it at the end of the session. She kept her word.
Matt Biddulph accused me of “blogging like it’s 2003″ this week (long posts, complete with photos and video clips). Personally, I thought I’d been very lazy by not tidying up my notes from the sessions and including them too (yet) but all of that will come later. Perhaps in digested form I’m typing so fast and there’s not enough time to process and digest between sessions and parties.
So, more lazy posting today.
The Lego interactive playpen is still interesting.
Paul Boag’s panel on using social software for your brand.
The Interactive and Film tradeshow is largely dull, though has a couple of great stals. Creative Commons, O’Reilly and Make are all there.
Matt Biddulph showed some of us a couple of upcoming Dopplr features, which I won’t pre-announce of course, but I’m rather excited about.
Justin Hall (a big hero of mine) presented PMOG, which I’m already addicted to and will certainly be thinking and writing about soon.
The evening parties included one for Google Open Social and the famous Great British Booze Up. I met Ewan Spence for the first time, and a bunch of us ended up at what I think was the Geico party. There was a caveman there, which meant something to the Americans. Some sort of ad campaign mascot type thing. Other than a few clusters of oh-so-hip hipsters, it was actually very quiet, which was a rather nice thing since I needed to sit down quietly and rest my legs and ears. There was lots of lovely free drink all night. Here was the view of the other side of my table (at least, for a while). Rachel Clarke, Robert Scoble and Ewan Spence.
Austin Laser Art were at the Screenburn arcade yesterday and today, offering free laser etching on iPods, Moleskine notebooks, laptops, and in fact pretty much anything you handed them. They offered a book full of designs, or you could email in your own EPS file. I found this lovely Transformers logo, which they quickly used to create a custom layout and within minutes had turned my MacBook Pro into an Autobot.
Here’s a video of that process, in fabulous Real Time.
Our panel was on today as well, but that will have to have its own post. I was a little bit sad to miss the Zuckerberg/Facebook keynote, which was on at the same time. (We almost filled the room anyway, which was nice). The updates on Twitter, the official backchannel and other coverage all hint at that something interesting, perhaps even slightly trainwrecky, happened in the Zuckerberg interview. There certainly seems to have been some disquiet and unrest in the audience, and I’m looking forward to seeing a video of the whole thing (please?).
Even more interesting and wonderful things at SXSW today. I saw the Rocketboom gang sitting behind me in a panel on video blogging (at which Bre Pettis was presenting). Later I watched Corey Bridges ranting eloquently on the future of gaming and virtual worlds (“Sucks to be you, media oligopolists”), and Dan Hon being similarly smart and eloquent about ARGs.
Some people are cursed with daft names by cruel parents. Imagine, if you will, the trauma caused to someone named Roo Reynolds. Surely life can throw no more misfortune in their faces? But no. Roo is employed by IBM.
How much worse can things get, I hear you ask?
Quite a bit, it would appear from Mr or Ms Reynold’s business card
You’re a what?
Chuckle.
The climax of the day was another comedy ‘unpanel’: Andy Baio’s ‘Worst Website Ever’ competition, in which Merlin Mann was just one of eight contestants proposing ideas-so-crazy-they-might-just-work to venture capitalist David Hornik. I recorded a video of Merlin’s winning proposal.
Day 1, and the first job was to pick up the bag and directory. There are a lot of bags waiting to be picked up.
I took in a couple of panels in the afternoon. In between them, the interactive playpen - a huge pile of Lego under the escalators - attracted children, playful geeks, and photographers
Battledecks II, the second annual competition which pits presenters against each other in a surreal improvisational comedy competition. Sometimes described as PowerPoint Karaoke, except that with karaoke you usually know the song before you sing. In Battledecks, the speakers don’t get to see the slides in advance, and have to keep the flow going, and are also judged on jargon, gestures and credibility.
The stand out performance (and the winner) was Anil Dash. Here’s his excellent performance.
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I was at Game Camp 08 on Saturday. It was held in Sony’s 3Rooms building near Shoreditch which is amazing. Imagine your dream flat, but full of rather more PS3s and PSPs than you could ever need. That said, the Sony branding wasn’t actually overpowering, and the venue was a very good choice.
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