The Studio is brimming with history this week, as Kaspar wires up an interactive shoe installation for National Trust’s Croome Country House, Calvium releases an AppTrail of 15th Century Florence, and Splash and Ripple launch their 14th Century adventure at Bodium castle.

Kaspar has been reworking the electronics inside some interactive shoe installations destined for the National Trust’s beautiful Croome House. National Trust are collaborating with a collection of artists and a shoemaker on a project called Soul to Sole, calling for the design and creation of interactive shoe installations that tell the stories of the house’s different inhabitants across the ages.

Calvium have been working alongside two historians of Renaissance Italy, to develop an AHRC funded App Trail called Hidden Florence. The app will allow you to switch between a Renaissance and modern map, and explore the city through the eyes of a 1490s wool worker called Giovanni. Calvium took Bonsignori’s 1584 city map and precisely pegged it to a modern street map of Florence. The result is a Google-like period map, where GPS tracks your progress through the streets and triggers Giovanni’s stories.

Splash & Ripple’s marvellous 14th Century adventure, A Knight’s Peril has just launched at Bodium Castle. Visitors will be equipped with echo horns (containing a mobile phones) and will use them to catch echoes from the castle walls (using RFID), following the characters they choose to follow in order to find out the deadly secrets at the castle’s heart. If you’re passing by, it’ll definitely be worth a visit.

Pocket Spacecraft (pioneers of personal space exploration) are exploring ways they can use people’s mobile phones as groundstations for their future lunar mission. Alex has been designing games that encourage players to point their phone at the right place in the sky so that while they play, the phone can download data from orbiting spacecrafts in the background. This week, he has been prototyping by mapping the position of the International Space Station relative to the phone, and has designed an alien spacecraft to signify ISS’s position, which will act as a target in the game.

Bristol’s Harbourside was met with an intriguing sight last week as Studio residents filed out of Watershed, clutching lycra-clad, landscape reactive creatures to their chests. They were actually play testing for Nikki Pugh’s project, Colony, and experiencing first hand how their own navigation of the city alters when they are carrying creatures whose well being depends on clear GPS signals.

Huge congratulations are due to Arthur Buxton and the Colourstory team, who reached their £6000 kickstarter target last week, and can now go ahead with creating a free web platform and app which will enable anyone to extract colours from a set of images and turn them into a beautiful, unique colour artwork.