You know when you’re moving to a new house. There’s always that list of new bits you need to go buy, scrounge or ‘borrow’. Things like Cabinets, Poncy Coffee table, Cupboards and there’s no doubt that you’ll be missing all your table-spoons. Well our list after the recent secret move of the Den could do with one thing adding it’s list. A Sandbox.

Not a normal grainy one with endless castles and pit potential. But more like one of the Media Sandboxes that the Pervasive Media Studio has just released.

The Pervasive Media Studio

To fill you in, a Media Sandbox is a funded challenge open to any technologists. It’s aim is purely at  allowing people/companies/artists to come up with a idea to tackle a problem, create a new service or create an experience.

A 2009 Media Sandbox commission

The first is B-Open Sandbox (http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk/awards/), and invites ideas on utilising the wealth of data-feeds out there and turning them into useful apps, sites or experiences. So for example and app which helps people decide which city to move to according to a government air-quality feed.

The second is Pervasive Experiences Sandbox (http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk/awards/) and invites ideas on creating ground-breaking pervasive which should pull together mobile, wireless & sensor technologies to create meaningful experiences.

Thought Den, being a company who are constantly playing with, researching and creating new technologies for clients, commissions and fun (just check out our latest Geek club). Will definitely be putting ideas & concepts into the mix.

Then hopefully we’ll have a new Sandbox to play with in the Den.

Our previous Media Sandbox commission

Happy Packages Dick Penny

One of the best weekends of the summer! Absolute chaos, such fun and that rosy glow of satisfaction at having done something different for a change. Simon Johnson’s igfest kicked off in spectacular fashion with

Journey to the Centre of the Night, a game involving over 170 people who were emailed a secret location on the day of playing and were told to meet at dusk. What ensued turned out to be a real highlight of the weekend for everyone involved. ‘Players’ following cryptic clues across Bristol, stalked by the fearsome ‘chasers’, encountering bizarre and wonderful experiences if they were stealthy enough to evade capture. Locations included gold-digging in Castle park, intense intimidation in the cells of Bridewell police station and a frantic dash across the river in a specially commissioned boat.

Rainbow Rain on a sunny Saturday afternoon was a glorious spectacle mixing the carnage of Battle Royale and the paint-spattering creativity of Play School Arts Day. Three teams, three colours, and eventually a paint spattered Castle Park even Van Gogh would be happy with.

Sneaks and Blaggers, an urban twist on Snakes and Ladders, was played out in a town centre Cark Park as the dust settled on a momentous Saturday. Players congregated for the briefing outside the high rise car park, some still paint-covered and exhausted from previous exploits, ready for the tower block battle – a mad dash up the stairs and down the ramps, collecting coloured strips, avoiding the ‘Blaggers’ stalking the car park in sleigh bells, to finish first with by shouting : “DULUX!”

Korean Laser Ball was an energetic start to Sunday, with teams of 5 battling it out in the Arnolfini Arena, commentated superbly by two visiting Americans. Each team had a theme song, a costume, a laser, 2 mirrors and one target. The battles were fast and furious, and only the highest scoring teams progressed. Team Perv, honourbly entering the arena to show how it was done, racked up a measly 6 to the following scores of 50, 68 and 100. Team Rubber suffered an ignominious defeat despite an awesome fightback from behind in the 2nd quarter…

A huge thank you to Clare Reddington, Simon Johnson, the Helens, Mobile Pie, Ed Nixon (for the poilcemen photo) and many many more who helped make this such a special event. Roll on next year

It could’ve done cos’ the last time you saw the team we were hugging and drinking 9k’s worth of champagne at the final MediaSandbox Event. Well here’s where we’re at…

The Team have been ripping the research apart and putting it back together in the form of the Pervasive Campaign machine ready for investment.

Though June we (more…)

I’ve been carrying out some very ‘in-depth’ studies into social network usage over our short-lived British Summer, and realised I’ve been using Facebook a lot less.

Apparently my ‘phone-losing house-mate‘ hasn’t checked hers in a few days too and it raised the point relating to my pervasive weather post.

We’re more likely to interact with our desktops over winter’s cold months, but (more…)

It’s been hard-core few months, as you might tell from the other blog posts and mediasandbox…a lot of fun, inspiring, challenging, and more than anything this project has opened hundreds of doors for everyone involved. A realisation dawned this week that we really are operating at the forefront of the pervasive media industry…things break, people don’t understand, it’s new NEW stuff!

Our stand looked beautiful, as did Tom’s face beaming out from the 42″ plasma screen. People milled around, took the Happy Packages GPS demo for a test drive, asked us what on earth we were talking about and nodded knowingly when we explained the difficulties working with pervasive convergence in multi-platform content distribution systems.

At around 3 or 4 it was time to deliver the 6 minute presentation and face the judging panel, who were:
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