Noogy
Noogy was a building-size Tamagotchi-style virtual pet that combined ’smart’ buildings and mobile phone technologies. The AI and SMS system that provided the basis of his personality was based on an intelligent mobile phone marketing tool that I developed with digital creative Jamie Taylor called Stanley. It was nominated for and won the mobile category Media Innovation Award and was described by the judges as “an innovative way in which it used artificial intelligence to receive text information and respond to it”. To watch a short video of Noogy in action, click here.
drumThing
drumThing is an experiment in extending a traditional drum kit. Using a custom built MAX/MSP patch, the percussionist learns to play it as they would any other part of their kit and enables them to mix different fills previously impossible due to physical limitations. Project documentation is available here.
The patch is released under the Creative Commons licence as at the bottom of the page and can be downloaded here.
Watch a video performance of drumThing here – the file is 23.2MB.
BluPong
This is my first attempt at mobile gaming. Based on the 70’s classic Pong, the player has 3 lives to collect as many points as they can by hitting the ball against the wall. Once they have lost all of their lives, they can then upload their score to a leaderboard. The game has been tested on the Sony Ericsson K600i and K700i although there is no reason why it shouldn’t work on any MIDP2.0 compatible device – I would be interested in any feedback from people who play this on other devices.
You can download the game by right-clicking on the image below and saving the link to somewhere convenient. Then transfer BluPong.jar to your device via Bluetooth, USB or infrared. And if you want to check out the leaderboard, have a look here.
Simulacra
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true” – Ecclesiastes
The brief was to create an object that was a reinterpretation or an innovatory development of an object. I redesigned the football shinpad by crossing it with the car airbag and created a promotional cd for a sports equipment manufacturer to help with their marketing. You can view a web version of the cd by clicking below.
Simulacra
Construction of Situations
I was invited to take part in a workshop run by Shaun Murray. I decided to film the journey taken from one end of Portland Square to the other from the perspective of the ambulant and the disabled. Considering the technology installed in the building to make the lives of the inhabitants easier, it is surprising the extra amount of time and distance that a disabled person must travel to reach the other end of the building.
The film plays both journeys concurrently enclosed in the outline of the 3-d representation of the space occupied by the stairs and the wheelchair lift. The filesize is 18MB so will take some time to download.
Construction of Situations
Nest Building
This is my first venture into the world of Java and simulates a colony of wasps building nests. There are 2 kinds of wasps, Producers and Modifiers. The Producers make nest material and start constructing a nest whereas the Modifiers pick up the material and use it for their own nests. Both sets of wasps have their own set of rules for using the nest material.
Nest Building