BBC Headroom – Interactive Application for World Mental Health Day

BBC Headroom – Interactive App

In the run up to World Mental Health Day on the 10th October the BBC Live Sites network will be screening my Headroom Interactive Application across all 21 Big Screens and at 6 special BBC Headroom events. The application ties into the BBC Headroom campaign running across a range of traditional and digital media and can be played by the public during scheduled sessions.

Motion Detection software is used to enable users to interact with the application by popping thunderclouds, transforming them into happy balloons, as they float past the user on screen. When balloons are generated and thunderclouds squashed by users, the landscape transforms from a baron nighttime wilderness into a lush summer’s day. As users’ continue to burst their thunderclouds flowers begin to grow, leaves appear on trees, and butterflies & birds fly into the landscape, before a sun burst laden finale congratulates the users on their thundercloud squashing skills. Throughout this transformation the number of balloons created at individual sites is passed between the screen sites across the UK and this information is fed back as inter-city smile scores. Users are regularly updated to where the leading smile-creating city is and encouraged to generate more smiles across the screen network.

The application will be running from the 30th September through to and including World Mental Health Day on the 10th October. If you have a BBC Big Screen near you why not pop down and burst a few thunderclouds of your own or alternatively you can find out more info on the BBC’s Headroom website at www.bbc.co.uk/headroom/.

PHOENIX SQUARE

Phoenix Square is a brand new creative hub, alongside an independant arts cinema, workspace and office studios, at the heart of Leicester’s vibrant Cultural Quarter. Back in June I worked with Phoenix Square’s design agency to develop a full Flash site to showcase the development for both Living Spaces and Work Studios. The site includes a Flickr, Google Maps and CMS integration for direct updates by the Phoenix Square team.

Visit the site

BBC 5Live’s Slogger – Big Screen Interactive Application

Picture above: Testing the application on the BBC Outdoor Screen.

“Slogger” is an Interactive Application developed for BBC 5Live and for use at events across the UK during the 2009 cricket season. The Ashes Festival in Leeds will be screening the app all week from 04 Aug 2009.

The application uses motion detection to calculate the user’s response to a number of animated balls delivered by a bowler. The speed of reaction, direction of movement and power of play are tracked from the user and the ball reacts showing the shot played out on screen. As each shot is played a virtual audience celebrate the success (or lack of it) of the user. Leather against Willow Sound effects were developed for each type shot of shot and increase the pay back for the user. As the name suggests the object of the game is to “slog” the ball, with a shot out of the stadium bagging the user 6 runs. Each user receives an over (6 balls) with their total score calculated after each ball. At the end of the over users are congratulated or consoled on their performance throughout the game.

The visual and game play were developed to be friendly, encouraging users of all abilities to get involved and play games with the big screens in cities across the UK and at special 5Live events across the UK.

I will be posting pictures of the app in use at events as soon as I get the time.

Slogger gets a small mention in The Guardian

The Village Screen – Interactive Apps at Glastonbury 2009

This year I was lucky enough to be asked to be part of The Village Screen Interactive team for Glastonbury Festival 2009. The Village Screen was led by the Region’s 2012 Creative Programmer, Glastonbury Festival, Team South West and Relays (Legacy Trust UK programme) and including the UK’s network of Creative Programmers, screen agencies and the BBC’s Live Sites team. The Village screen was a doubled sided screen at the heart of Glastonbury showing a mixture of Interactive Applications, short films, live coverage and artwork from creatives across the UK. Working with OneTenEleven, the Woom and Jeffrey Bowman we developed Virtual Band an open mic based application that animated on screen characters based on the music generated by festival goers stepping up to the mic.

Flickr
Camp Pilton blog

OneTenEleven
theWoom
JeffreyBowman

CCS

Capital Coated Steel database driven Flash website.

FORMAT FESTIVAL 09

The FORMAT 09 festival kicks off today 05th March 2009 with a plethora of events in and around Derby, UK.

FORMAT is one of the UK’s leading contemporary photography and media festivals. The festival celebrates the wealth of contemporary practice in international photography. FORMAT is showing an incredible range of new work alongside the best known practitioners of the world.

Featuring: David Lynch, Hannah Starkey, Muge, Zhang Xiao, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, Jonas Mekas, Eric Baudelaire, Simon Roberts, Mark Read, Nichola Dove, Bethany Murray, Magnum Cinema, Pang Xuan, Wim Wenders, Steve Harries and Mel Bles + many more.

The FORMAT 09 website has been running over the last few weeks with an amazing 1600+ submissions from all corners of the globe, with many more to come as the festival continues throughout March. Anyone can become part of the festival via the Your PHOTOCINEMA website . Selected submissions will be shown online, via the BBC’s Outdoor Big Screen in the heart of Derby and at selected exhibitions.

AudioVein MSA FLUID experiments

View the Video on Vimeo

Audio Vein MSA Fluid Exp 1

Interestingness – A Daily Dose of Interesting Photographic Inspiration from Flickr

Interestingness.com is an Flickr interface written in ActionScript 3 that uses the Flickr.com API (Beta) to display photo wall using the Interestingess algorithm. The Interes.tingness.com photo wall is updated daily, throughout the day. Up to 500 images and photos are displayed on the wall at anyone time. User’s can search previous days’ interestingness feeds by entering the date and fetching it.

AudioVein

AudioVein is a visualisation project that analyses audio in real time and uses the stength of frequencies within the audio to control the brush on screen. The colour, thickness and direction of the brush is controlled via the audio wth some Brownian Motion thown in to keep a momentum.

I originally wrote this project in ActionScript using the ComputeSpectrum library but due to the lack of inputs available I decided to re-write the project using Processing to give a greater scope for its application. The project is still in the early stages but already producing nice results from different types of audio. The examples above use tracks from Evil Nine and Jamie T.

ASH – Door Furniture

Extensive HTML Catalogue site for ASH Door Furniture manufacturer.