Week commencing 6 August 2012:

Last weekend Bristol’s wonderful Balloon Fiesta kicked off, filling the skyline with some amazing visual delights. Festival fever seems to have extended into the Studio as we’ve had residents heading off to Boomtown and hosted an exciting hack event for Igfest.

On Sunday one of our REACT Heritage Sandbox projects Ghosts in the Garden took place in the Sydney Gardens at the Holburne Museum in Bath. Developed by Splash & Ripple, Ghosts in the Garden was part game, part story and part immersive sound scape (accessed via a special 'Georgian Listening Device.') Visitors met and interacted with real characters from the Gardens' heyday, in a unique experience where history and imaginative play meet head-on. You can find out more about projects and future REACT sandboxes here.

This week the brilliant Ad Spiers joined us as a hotdesker. Ad’s from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where his main area of research involves developing haptic technologies. He has been investigating a number of different applications, from giving surgeons tactile feedback during tele-surgery (where the surgeon controls robot arms and instruments remotely), to accessible immersive theatre. Most recently Ad collaborated with origami artist Coco Sato and interaction designer Peter Bennett to hide simple robotics within larger-than-life sized origami foxes at Secret Garden Party 2012. The foxes subtly moved their heads as the festival goers passed by, you can watch a video here. We’re very excited that he’s joined our wonderful community of residents and we’ll be bringing you updates on what he’s working in the coming weeks.

On Tuesday and Wednesday the guys from Slingshot were joined by some lovely folk from Nottingham Mixed Reality Lab for a two day hack event at the Studio to see how they could use Artificial intelligence in their games at Igfest. Igfest is Bristol’s interesting games festival, which is running from the 5 to the 8 of September, and is set to be bigger and better than before. This year the festival splits into headline games: 2.8 Hours Later, Incitment, Cargo and The Fringe games, a carnival of mini-games taking place on Saturday in Castle Park. You can buy tickets, watch trailers and find out more information at their website here, so make sure you don’t miss out!

It’s been a busy week for the Mail, Maps and Motion team who have been working hard in the edit suite. On Monday Joanie had a great meeting with Adrian from Portishead in the Studio to listen to the new composition and go through images. On Tuesday Virginie and Morgan spent the morning on the SS Great Britain where Virginie photographed some of Brunel’s stunning original sketches. They then headed back to the Studio, so Morgan could start animating the sketches to use in the introduction of the piece. Virginie then continued to battle on with vvvv to sync all the lights to the music and video being used during the performance. You can follow them on twitter to get updates and pictures of their progress: Joanie, Morgan and Virginie. 

Nicola has finished and published the write up of the two day UltraHaptics workshop we held at the Studio a few weeks ago, you can read about it here. She has also been busy preparing for the interviews for the talent development case studies that she will be working on until December. She’ll be starting to interview people in the next few weeks so we’ll be keeping you updated on how they’re going.  

Vic has been busy preparing for a workshop for Encounters Festival. The workshop will be looking at the ways that filmmakers can expand their stories on multiple platforms. It seems to be a really popular topic for conversation at the moment so look out for more details in the next few weeks. Vic has also been busy coordinating for the arrival of the Artists in Residence at the Studio in October and you can find out more about their exciting projects here.  

This week another app created using Calvium’s AppFurnance was released on the app store. It’s a GPS walking app developed by Creative Wiltshire called The Wiltshire Ridgeway Walk. You can find out more about it and purchase it here.

It’s been an exciting week over at nu desine as the checkout on their website went live so you can now purchase your very own AlphaSphere here. Adam also headed to Boomtown festival on thursday to play the AlphaSphere along with Resinate. We'll report back on how it went in next weeks blog.

Tom has continued work on Tine’s new piece for the V&A. The indoor poistioning system is now calibrated so Tom’s working on getting it to communicate with the audio programming environment Max/MSP, and we’re all still eagerly awaiting the arrival of the superhero capes in the Studio.

Vanessa has been busy sorting out Duncan Speakman and Uninvited Guests upcoming trip to Portugal. Over on the Open City website they have also published some great online think pieces, one by Haidee Bell on Open Governance and another by WAAG Society on Open Design so make sure you have a read.

Remember there’s no Open Studio Friday’s or Lunchtime Talks during August but you can check out our events page for details of some of the talks and other exciting things coming up in September.