And more music collaboration...

Soundlines, an educational pervasive landscape project with Strata Collective, has been simmering away in the background for the past 6-7 months, and last night we had our first sample audio-walk with music created by Russ and Jane in response to Sand Point, North Somerset.
Contact me if you'd like an invite to a Soundlines hilltop experience celebrating the launch of the Cultural Olympiad at the end of July....

walks & films go live!

The walks and films from Friday, Saturday and Sunday are now live on the website!

Here's the opening scene and trace of the walk by the ladies pictured below.
So, what's the connection with this image - any guesses to what's being planted, why, and how it relates to the park?....

Tracing the Park

'Tests and traces' was yesterday's theme in the park... look out for some video snippets of the first e-merge walkers at http://www.e-merge-walks.com/ when the festival starts. It was great to see the images playing in the location they're made for, and some useful feedback from the Zeph & Alex, thanks.




Pretty quickly the walks were up on a test-site on the web (with wifi & hot chocolate at the ICA cafe), so thankyou to Ben who is busy on the web side of the film-making, right now!

The Royal Parks have kindly agreed to use of their illustrated map in e-merge, so the first task was to walk around the park marking where I was on the map at various points, so mscape could turn the image into a 'real' map.. clever stuff.. 50 points later, and there's a bit of give, but pretty accurate for the central area of the park, so walkers will be able to view their journey on the map if they want to.

Then checking precise location of 'no-go' areas (like the new dredging site, and the park police station) so that the content regions will be in just the right places.

Interesting observation: mscape logs a trace for every map in the mediascape, so as I had Bristol still in there from Friday, as well as the illustrated map I was testing out, it recorded 3 traces...

creating a 5.5mb file for a 95 minute walk, and a trace overlay that made me gasp for a moment!!

Fortunately it was all salvageable with a few tweaks in excel (thanks for the tips, Zeph!) - so my legs didn't ache in vain!

Bingo!

We got all the regions today - some more than once. 23 minutes and a pretty efficient route!

The dogs think this is a great project - lots of extra walks, perfect for the border collie nature - 'random' twists and turns, not following the usual trampled path !

I found myself thinking about gaming as I walked. Mscapes, interactive and mobile technologies are used a lot for gaming, and whilst it's not something I spend my time doing, I've enjoyed and learnt a lot from the few games I have tried out - especially live real & virtual games, like the Come Out & Play urban games festival in Amsterdam I went to a couple of years ago. But I also find games a bit too prescriptive. It's more fun when you can change the rules and try your own version - do you get £400 for landing on go? Does all the cash really go into 'free parking'?!

So is there a game element to e-merge?

What interests me more than creating plots and puzzles is to provide a rich environment and then see what happens. More of a creative play I suppose - if you want to play with e-merge, you can make different walks, you could walk in circles (which someone did with the sister mediascape Something More), you could run backwards and forwards, try and 'catch' all the content regions - and see what happens if you catch them in different sequences or more than once. Or just explore the park - on and off the trodden pathways. You could arrange to walk with a friend, start together, go different routes and then meet again at a 'viewing' point. Or experiment with the same small area but choosing different music for your walk; maybe play with where and when you watch your film, the synchronicites with the surroundings that that could present. Or anything else to find out what's possible...

So I hope e-merge will have a light, fun, playful element for those who want it, and encourage the walkers to be adventurous and experiment. To me that's a bit like switching off the TV and going out to play with your own video camera instead....

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.

lots of strands...

... these 2 shown below are from 10 second and 30 second traces of the same walk made thismorning and used to test the website bits that will go live next week... thanks Ben!

... there's also some background to the project on the BEV blog , and a page up on the e-merge walks website (where the films/walks will be shown during and after the festival).

... content-wise, it's coming together well, informed by the mscape region layout as well as the music, park layout and the footage captured.

... organisation also involves things like booking forms for equipment, checking logos, making sure the correct software's installed on ipaqs, user-testing and another visit to the Park etc... so quite a lot of strands to weave together into one!

step by step

Once again, trying to fix a couple of unlikely scenarios ended up making things that worked go a little peculiar... So enough fiddling around.. here's another walk made thismorning.

I do like the images traces make!
(The scribble at the top is when the device lost fix for a bit, and tried to work out where it was.)

Making and posting them here is a welcome little break - bit of a visual treat and tiny celebration or waymarker - whether it's successful or not, it's still a step closer to the destination.

Good news from 2.5 - it remembers the logger configuration!

x 30 x 3 = 2.5

... or something more even! 30 content region pairs, each with video, slideshow, state and scripts. Moved into mscape experimental 2.5, and everything's going well except that the playlist seems to behave differently to 2.1 (probably doesn't need the workarounds I'd built in to it before any more!) so there's still a few bugs to iron out, but this is pretty much what will transfer to the Park. So it's over to Ben to add in the flash parts and extract data to recreate the films on the web. Exciting stuff!

Why is there no red trace (showing my walk)? Every time the mscape gets saved as a new version it needs the logger re-configuring, and in my excitement to run round the field again I forgot! Maybe tomorrow...

wild geese

Friday was a bit of a wild goose chase - I got carried away with trying to

pre-empt any kind of user action that would cause the mediascape to work differently from planned. Eventually I got to the point where building in lots of precautions was starting to 'break' it for ordinary use... A few steps forward, a couple back again.. in both the muddy field and on the computer!

The things that happen in the tester or on a micro-walk are less likely to happen in the Park-scale version.

Setting expectations and introducing the context of the experience is really important for walkers, and that will happen through the intro. narrative, instructions on screen, as well as giving any advice needed when they book out their ipaq at the ICA. Those bits are missing from the sketch at the moment, so it's easy to get over-vigilant about what people may do! There's also a fine balance between wanting it to be robust for public use, but also being a piece of innovative development, part of ongoing r&d - without the commercial end product that (should) necessitate a further level of usability. - and there's also the reality of one person's time!

So the latest stage has been adapting the local test to a sensible scale and making sure it works for the kind of scenario I want to create in the Park. That's the first trace below.

I will be extending the regions over the next few days so I can try out how the content runs together, and check performance of the ipaq once it's got a lot more imagery loaded. So the second trace shows the edge of an easily walkable area of the field - without falling into hedges, boggy land, or the neighbouring building site!

Looking SSE across the field-test...

field test = in the field

It's a long way to London, so field tests are needed closer to home. Hopefully we'll be at a stage to test the structure and content with some experienced mscape-users in Bristol by the end of next. Meanwhile it's a muddy field in Somerset for wellies and walks!

This is the structure mentioned in the previous post, but mapped into a nearby field. It's shown up a couple of things already that didn't happen when tested on the office computer... proving once again that regular field visits (& therefore local as well as located) - iterative testing - are essential for any development with pervasive media. The worst bit was while I was chasing satellites, my dog was free to roll in something very,very smelly!

Mapping & first traces

Here's the traces from parts of my walks whilst filming etc.

OpenStreetMap seems to give the best (gps-accurate) visuals for the Park (as below). There's quite an interesting mix of maps and images out there including aerial photo and road layout, street maps, showing different interpretations of the park. Royal Parks have kindly given permission for me to use their illustrated map of the park in the mediascape, so that may feature too...

There are 3 ways maps will be used in e-merge:

• as a maplib in mscape to create the mediascape
• for map display to the walker while they're e-merge-ing in the park
• on the e-merge walks website to show the routes of the walks with the films generated

Something More re-visited

Yesterday and today I've been up Whitesheet re-visiting the Something More mediascape, and experimenting with traces and logging info - audio play, location, angle, playlist events - ready for the BEV e-merge mediascape, to extract data and recreate short films made by people's walks. (To go on the web and to promote the mediascape to the festival audiences).

Here are the first couple of traces overlaid, a reminder of the Something More layout (this was a working pilot for development and expansion).

The films made will follow in a few days.

3 walks in wind and rain:

I want to upload the log file in google documents, but it's bigger than the 500K max. Looking out for another online system.

In the meantime I tried to include it as a new post, but it's too big for that too! Tbc...