In Cambridge, a telephone is ringing… and it’s for you.

Hi all,

Activity has reached fever pitch for us here at The Junction in Cambridge, so apologies for going slightly quiet on this blog for a bit. But consequently there is lots to report…

Week commencing 31st August, we visited the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol with our scale models – during this time we discussed the storyboard we have created with Katie Day who offered useful feedback based on an initial readthrough, and we began experimenting with projection from mini-projectors onto scale model surfaces. Towards the end of that week we met with Tarim in London to discuss the different kinds of interactions that might occur between the participant and the models, how they might be triggered using Arduinos and what was feasible in a relatively tight timescale.

Tarim requested from us a list of the desired effects we wished to achieve in order of priority and a floor plan indicating cable runs so he could work independently and arrive prepared in Cambridge to help us get-in on 27th Sept.

Above: A sketched floorplan…

We then met with Tim Brooke from Nokia to discuss the kinds of interaction that might be possible between a Surface Table and objects placed on the surface of the screen. This meeting raised a number of fascinating possibilities, but it became evident that our schedule and Tim’s were not compatible in the short term to have something in place to test on 29th Sept – scarily by this time, we had negotiated the generous loan of a Surface Table from the Microsoft Research Labs in Cambridge, but had no software developer in place to programme it (another catch 22: we needed a software programmer at an early stage but could’t bring one onboard until we’d confirmed that the appropriate hardware was in place!). Clare Reddington helped us at this point to source a programmer who we have been having a dialogue with over these passed 2 weeks called Kate Ho at a company called Interface 3 - we are now on version 3 of a ‘walkthrough’ storyboard plotting the precise interactions between the user and the surface table:

We’ve just come out of a production week at The Junction Cambridge, which we rounded off with some early scratch testing in front of a small audience. Whilst some key components were still missing at this stage (ie. the interactive table surface), we were still able to find low-fi ways of communicating what the eventual experience might be; the process generated some really helpful user feedback which we are documenting and responding to over the coming fortnight prior to our testing on the 29th Sept. We had initially conceived of the experience we were creating as a one-to-one experience, but we have decided to use the testing to present our work to different sized audience groupings as part of our experimentation.

Above: Playing with scale

Above: Small worlds discovered by peeking through small doors

Production week video/images (13th-17th Sept, The Junction Cambridge):

Above: Hannah experiments with simple shadow effects (which will eventually be controlled remotely)

Above: Model of my house built into a collapsing box – lifting the lid will trigger sound effects and light

Above: Multi-tasking (!) - Hannah discusses Surface Table programming with Kate Ho, whilst I work on our scale models

Above: Attaching 1:120 scale model figurines to the base of a model (a very fiddly business)

Above: Testing in front of an audience – streaming live feeds into models

Next week we return to The Junction to continue testing, building, overseeing the arrival of the Microsoft Surface Table – our table programmer will be coming down from Scotland the following week to ensure the software is working correctly (on 27th Sept) – there is a lot to bring together over the coming week and a half – tiredness is kicking in after a fair few late nights, but more than anything else we’re really excited to see it all coming together, and we really hope you can join us on the 29th.

Thanks for reading.

Liam (& Hannah)

PS: We’d like to say a very big thank you to Katie & Ed, and Simon Bedford & Chris Woodley for very kindly providing us with somewhere to stay whilst in Bristol/Cambridge and for being such wonderful hosts, and thanks to all at The Junction team for being so accomodating to experimentation, and all the challenges that comes with it (in particular Kate, Kye, James, Simon, Izzy, all the box office team and the audience that took part in our first test on 17th Sept)