Dear Roomwarenauts,
I wanted to give you all a quick little update on the stuff we have been working on lately. The last few weeks we have kept ourselves busy with lining up some cool new projects and events for The Roomware Project through Alchemyst our experience design agency. While most of these are still in concept mode one is running right now in multiple location in Utrecht, the Netherlands at the IMPAKT festival.
Hybrid Playground
The Impakt festival is a dutch art festival exploring new technology and the impact it has on the people using it. This years theme is Your Space, in the words of the festival organiser:
"Web 2.0 is vibrant with promise: communicating, exchanging and networking with applications that can be adjusted to the users wishes with increasing ease. This trend which fits the image of the individualization of society, at the same time nourishes the rise of specific subcultures.
With Web 2.0 everybody can create their own space and personality, and build a personal network of like-minded people.
But what exactly are the quality properties of these new structures and how do they relate to existing social contexts? Are Hyves and MySpace about social networking or are they merely platforms for vain self-exposure? Is a blog a public diary or a valuable contribution to the social debate? And what is the meaning of a festival now that makers can reach their audience through YouTube in an increasingly simple manner?"
http://impakt.nl
One of the tracks at this festival is called the Hybrid Playground; a collection of installations by different groups and artists one of which was conceived by Alchemyst. Combining some of the data from other installations our Payback installation visualizes the behaviour of the people at the festival using zones to show where people are by scanning their bluetooth devices and attaching this locatio to their festival identity. Furthermore it show voting events that are generated by another application running at the festival by a group called Netniet which also uses Roomware software. When a voting event takes place both the voter and the votee are highlighted and we pull extra information from dutch social network Hyves to offer a little more background on the target of the vote.
The Netniet app allows visitors to vote on each other using a mobile app, sms or festival consoles. Each day offers a new theme, so day 1 might ask you to vote on the drug-free-ness of your fellow visitors while day 3 you might be asked to rate them on a scale of dangerous. As people collect votes their status rises and they get to make use of better seating arrangements or get an extra cookie with their coffee. The concept is loosely based on Cory Doctorow's whuffies as a measure of social capital.
For a live view of the activity at the festival check out the following URL:
The Alchemyst installation was conceived and built by James Burke, Tijs Teulings & Tom Burger and The visuals were beautifully executed by Mark Barcinski & Adrien Jeanjean a.k.a.
http://www.barcinski-jeanjean.com/
b.t.w. the mobile app Netniet uses was built Michiel from Nulaz, whom some of you may know.
New version of Roomware server To support the new functionality needed for this project Tom built three great new additions to the Roomware server. The server now support an architecture where there is one master server collecting events from one or more slave servers. In this architecture it becomes possible to deploy any number of roomware servers while still having to listen to only one server for a list of the latest detected devices. To make sure you know where each device was detected the device list is extended with zones which allow each server to be configured with a unique name making it quite easy to show only the devices from a specific zone or otherwise use the added location functionality of zone in your application.
Thats not all though, as icing on the cake Tom also added a new communicator module which frees you from having to poll and XML file as it posts all new events directly to an URI configured at setup. This allows you to have a completely event based architecture where every new event is sent directly to your application as soon as it is detected making more realtime feedback a possibility without network intensive polling action.
Th new version of the roomware server can be found at our Google code repository along with a few more wiki pages on the new modules and communicators and how to configure them.
Impakt will be running the rest of the week in Utrecht (until sunday) so perhaps we'll see you there.
http://impakt.nl
