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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A strange thing happened outside the office last Wednesday. Oceana runs an under 18 night, and out of the blue came hundreds of kids shrieking and laughing.

So rather than commenting on the youth of today, the price of cheese and other such things, we tried out some Bluetooth gopping with out the support of any Pervasive Relations (P.R). The test also had some different variables to our last gopping experience when we were chased by fanny in town, (more…)

The ideas for Happy Packages could be great or they may stink, but hell it’s a research project and that’s what Thought Pie are meant to be finding out. Either way, no matter how good the implementation and delivery, something we’ll have to be wary of is Pervasive Fatigue.

The Situation

People who are constantly bombarded with repeated Bluetooth requests every time they walk past Co-op’s Bluetooth gopping device are slowly or possibly very quickly going to get annoyed with the vibration in the pocket requiring their attention. It’s just bad etiquette to interrupt someone with something un-expected and then probably ask them again the next day. So if during their personal time, while a client is choosing a sandwich, they’re re-asked to about downloading something, are we providing them with some very simple and mostly detrimental choices, get it, ignore it or turn their Bluetooth off. (more…)

Our new bit of lovely Bluetooth equipment arrived today, a Gumstix “Proximity Marketing device”!

This box will be able to push out files over Bluetooth to enabled devices and comes with a mini antenna and some fun Bubble-wrap! (more…)

The Happy Packages site is now live! It’s up and beautiful at, http://www.happypackages.com

It has details of all the projects Mobile Pie and Thought Den are exploring with the MediaSandbox research project and will be the public facing site for the projects.

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Is the new term given to people who send unsolicited files in a Bluetooth zone posing as the people visually transmitting.

Today we checked the distance we can deliver our content from when broadcasting from a raised position in the office.

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