Whew! What a mouth full. So what was this pervasive application lab thing I’ve just been to? It’s a long, long story about a long long week packed with interesting people and wild times. I fully intend to post some more on what we did discuss about pervasive applications and other things that occur to me as the idea of pervasiveness percolates through my mind.
First thing though, there was a ton of debate about what the term pervasive meant (more latter). The multi-user bit was fairly well understood. The application bit did seem to drift towards games as a large part of the gathering had game design and development background and if not games certainly the majority of time was spent describing game-like and playful interfaces.
We were also meant to take along a manifesto or design question. I took along the idea of using cooperation and collaboration as inseparable, key concepts when designing multi-user applications.
So rather than go into too much detail at this point, here’s a flavour of the ideas I was involved in. There was a lot of mixing up of groups to begin with and even a couple of concept swaps along the way (one enforced, the other competitively emergent) so none of these are “mine” and we all agreed that none were to be in any way secret.
A few things I worked on
- Busker boxes - performance telepresence. People pay to be watched in a world of unlimited free broadband.
- Magix - Augmented reality game platforms for ad hoc networks.
- Amulets and familiars for mixed reality tribes.
- Social Radiation - The card game
And some of the other end of week ideas.
- Democracy - The board game
- Public sculpture for community water management
- Underground Dreams - Personal stories on public transport
None of these are necessarily new concepts, and none of them have had any sort of feasibility or business plan around them. Overall though the most important thing was the exploring of the problem space and experimentaiton with the process.
