Wednesday 25 February 2009

growing

Here's the best test yet - now with real video and slideshow content from the park. The ipaq performed well, and the screen was very visible in the dusk! The battery seems to have held up fine, and even with a lot of media playing there were no real problems. That's a very happy feeling after the last couple of days of systematically figuring out some niggling playlist errors - which ones were bugs, new features in 2.5, quirks of my method, errors with the device, or inconsistencies within the programme.

The walk starts at the top (near the lane) and snakes around to end about a third of the way down the left side. It lasted 21 minutes, and then the film lasted for 15 minutes. The park is a lot bigger, so the scale of regions will be different as well as the layout, so the relative length of films will be much shorter.

With this walk I was watching my position on this map showing all the content regions and trying to walk through as many as possible. That's harder than you may think, in a bumpy muddy field on a slope, with no obvious physical mark of where the regions are!

It's interesting how different the route of my walk was because of this. I haven't decided yet whether to show people in the park where the regions are, or just show them the map of the park. They don't have to look at the map - just walk and enjoy the sight without needing to watch the screen.


1 comment:

  1. feedback is as suspected: that some people (especially younger/game-playing walkers) really like having the regions and map to play with as they walk. (See also the post: Bingo!)
    The aesthetic of the piece is more about ambient appreciation, sense of time and place, and connection with that. However a strong aim from the beginning, and ethos of my work in general, has been to make it appealing and engaging to as wide a public audience as possible. So ideally there will be a walking map choice, a 'don't need to watch the screen' choice, and a 'see the regions' map to choose from as you walk. But for now, who knows... come and try it to find out!!

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