From Rainclouds to photo-sharing apps, satellites to mind-controlled beer robots, a plethora of weird and wonderful prototypes were born in the Studio this week…

Daredevil Project have officially beta-launched Duel! They have been working day and night developing their new competitive photo-sharing app, and have just successfully closed their first VC round of funding. You can try it for free here, it’s a lot of fun, and they would love your feedback.

Tom Metcalfe, Martin Charlier and Devraj Joshi have been on a development sprint in the edit suite, working on their new project, Raincloud. They are creating beautiful little devices that will subtly give an indication of upcoming weather conditions. At the end of the sprint process, they had built a dozen prototypes for long-term user testing in people’s homes. The project will be live by the end of the month, but their website is up and running, and you can sign up to the Raincloud newsletter here to stay updated.

Strange Thoughts have kicked off development of Homer 2.0, their incredible mind-controlled beer robot. Having previously built a prototype model, they are now building a complete scalable product to take to market. They have secured funding, attracted celebrity investment, and crowd-sourced a crack team of specialists including electronics and game design academics, students from the University of Bristol, and fellow Studio residents. Jedi beer, nearly a reality… Here is a video of one of their early prototypes.

After months of prototyping and testing, PocketSpacecraft.com has started building the Interplanetary CubeSat flight hardware that will carry thousands of private individual thin film spacecrafts on a mission to the moon. If this all sounds very exciting and you want to know more about the project, have a look at their website to find out more about the project, who they are and what they have been getting up to.

The Studio atmosphere became instantly competitive when Alistair Aitcheson brought his multi-player touch screen game, Tap Happy Sabotage along for a bit of user testing. The main aim of the game is to find your own symbols, and to block other people from finding and touching theirs. There was a gaggle of Studio residents all huddled around one large touch screen, emitting a lot of squealing and a frantic blur of hands.

It was Digital Bristol Week this week, and the city was treated to a run of great talks and discussions involving a good number of Studio folk. Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow and Director of the DCRC Mandy Rose chaired a panel called ‘Immersive Ethics, Dream or nightmare’ with resident Rik Lander as a panel member. Mandy spoke about the importance of making sure that ethics is at the heart of the development process as we grapple with emerging technologies and creative possibilities. Holding on to ethics as a core consideration can make for ground breaking creative outputs. She also spoke about the process of ‘frothing’ (a term that Blast Theory coined describing post-play conversations in the pub) and ‘decompression’ that take place after an audience’s immersive experience. She feels that these are integral to an imersive experience, as they offer an opportunity for the audience to process their own emotional response and feelings about what they have experienced.

Yesterday, it was announced that a delegation of REACT Alumni are going to the GREAT Festival of Creativity in Shanghai at the beginning of March. The group includes residents Tom Metcalfe, Seth Jackson, Victoria Forrest, Laura Kriefman and Silas Adekunle. The Festival will be a celebration of creativity in business, and aims to start a new dialogue between global enterprises. We’re really excited for all of them.

We are delighted that resident Tom Abba (part of artist's collective Circumstance) has just become Associate Professor of Design at UWE. He will be working closely with the DCRC, and UWE's world-leading Centre for Fine Print Research.