So our new home is still Stokes Croft, this time right on the main drag, pretty much opposite Pie Minister. What more could you ask for? A lick of paint perhaps – and we’re on the case! The next two weeks will make Handy Andy proud: painting, hanging, chopping, glueing all for you good people. Friday 3rd Feb is the first party of the year, and the first in the new digs.

Expect (and get) proper food (Gloucester road delights, please see Lunchometer.co.uk) drink, entertainment, dangerball, gifts and prizes, borne from the Thought Den furnace.

Friday 3rd February, 6pm – 6am.

27 Stokes Croft, BS1 3PY (Buzzer between Fixie shop and Dulex paint centre)

Back in the good ol days

They didn’t want it! Well, they did, but they didn’t do anything with it for ages, so we stole it back (AHAA). Based on their original idea, we have now created…www.lunchometer.co.uk

Let me tell you a little bit about it…

Everybody likes lunch, but it’s a minefield out there. What’s needed is an easy method, preferably built in flash and colourised in earthy tones, for rating and sharing your favourite lunch spots. Lo and behold, from the fingers of tech emeritus flash wizard Adam Vernon flew graphs of spellbinding beauty…

It’s just a bit of fun, but we think it’s a nice way to do a little bit of office bonding, maybe give the new kid/senior C# developer advice on where to eat, and embed a little something cool on your blog without even breaking a sweat.

All you need to do is go to the Lunchometer creation-o-matic, specify a name and your area and start entering in your haunts! If you like, you can then copy the embed code and paste it anywhere you enjoy pasting HTML.

Here is the Thought Den Creative Director/senior hairstyle guru Ben Templeton’s one about lovely Stokes Croft:

As you can see, Biblos came out on top, mainly due to their bad boy portions, extreme tastiness and proximity to the office, with the French Patisserie coming in a close second.

A few of our good friends have had a pop as well:

Scott at Play Nicely clearly loving the work of slightly-out-the-way, Edward Lear themed Runcible Spoon.

Dave Tidman over at Kerve in Bath, collaborators on projects for JD and Soutern Comfort, obviously feeling the Nando’s portion love!

Whereas Hannah Flynn from Tate, for whom we made this lovely game, gives you a little rundown of what you can get around their neck of Millbank, LDN.

You may have also noticed the little ‘settings’ fork and spanner in the top right. Click on it. Go on! You can use these functions to discount certain ratings categories (if you don’t care about proximity, for example) and see how this effects the rankings. You can also change the graph to a more horizontal alignment, turn off the auto sorting or even make that Lunchometer full screen! MADNESS. Feeling hungry? Create your own Lunchometer right here!

Think of this post as a club sandwich. The juicy filling is our new game for Tate and National Galleries Scotland – we’re so damn pleased we can’t stop playing it and the gaming gauntlet has been thrown down! 27,000 highscore… But juicy filling alone doesn’t make a classic club sandwich. The bread-rock (yeah!) of any decent hunger-buster, neatly organising the contents, adding bulk and protecting keyboard-bound fingertips the world over is, of course, a few fine slices of the good stuff. And so it is with great pleasure we’d like to explain, explore and excite you with our working philosophy of ‘playful learning’, the bready goodness that helps us make digital sandwiches with substance.

A call from Tate…

Back in the depths of 2010 we received a call from Tate inviting us to pitch on a large educational game to support the ARTIST ROOMS tour. This is a collection of world-famous artworks by internationally renowned artists created by Anthony d’Offay and supported by the Art Fund. We pitched against some London big boys and a few West Country comrades and won the gig because of our characterful approach, something we have been refining since becoming founding residents of the Pervasive Media Studio in early 2008.

Thought Den’s credentials in game-making go back to 2005, when the founding directors worked under the wings of such Bristol luminaries as Andrew Parkhouse of Team Rubber and Dan Efergan, now Creative Director of Aardman Digital. In those early years, we built some addictive niceties such as Race Doggles, My Abodo and the more recent Fire Kills for the Central Office of Information and Swamp Drifter for Southern Comfort. But alongside a strong gaming portfolio, Thought Den were establishing a reputation in the education industry with e-Learning tools such as Parashoot and face-to-face workshops for students and professionals. (If you think we have bad hair now, watch some of our daft videos for a real education on bad haircuts)

ARTIST ROOMS : The Game

Over an intensive 6 week brainstorming and specification period we combined the various learning objectives of Young Tate with our gaming experience and THIS is what came out the other end, about 6 months, 200 artworks and 60 hours of 3D modeling later. Play the game for yourself.

The aim of the game is to choose one of 10 artists, select 5 artworks, and hang them in a 3D space that you can explore at the end of the game.

Before you get there, players must earn points in 4 categories, all inspired by the real-life challenges faced by Tate and NGS curators.

• Interpretation (knowing all there is to know about the artworks)
• Preservation (making sure they are not damaged, and are hung in their best condition)
• Lighting (each artwork will have different requirements for light levels both to preserve the artwork and present it clearly)
• Marketing (you gotta let people know about you! A blog perhaps…)

The highscore

If anyone can beat this highsore, we’ll take them on a VIP trip to Bristol Museum when ARTIST ROOMS comes to town in June 2012!

Press

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Contact the studio for Press enquiries. Download press pack.
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Things that people have already written about the game:

Art Daily

Museum Association

Jonathan Jones on Guardian Unlimited

On Twitter :

@EuroArtNet “Top story: Artist Rooms | Young Tate goo.gl/ez0tC”

@neatcraw “Clever little Artist Room game by the TATE..play it, waste time, it’s fun.. http://t.co/YtuaIwz. Scored 8,623!!”

@kettlesyard “So we’re all having a go at the Artist Rooms game but none of us in office here are that good, obviously in wrong jobs! http://t.co/80rtAa5”

@SelinaSargent “This is quite possibly my favorite game!! Who wants to be a curator?? I DOOO http://t.co/c0airyk”

@wandsworth_arts “WOW this is really cool @Tate http://t.co/yD6W65q”

@CultureKeyNice “Artist Rooms game from Young Tate http://t.co/ZBUVPog”

What’s next?

Tate invited us to pitch on an even bigger and more awesome and exciting project! Check out the app icon…we can’t say any more, probably not even this, but use and look for #magictateball

A closing thought

We learn when we play, and that is the core of our working philosophy. Our job is to create entertaining experiences with substance. We do this by combining the notorious Thought Den bounciness with long-established academic partnerships (thank you to the Centre of Excellence in Media Practice)and a few years of trial and error running educational events that have play at the heart of the learning experience.

A little environmental widget for your entertainment

Have now. Lesson 1, done!

They [heart] new eLearning tools.

Lesson 2 finito’.

Thought Den just released their spanking new site.

Lesson 3 wrapped.

That wasn’t too bad right! See we don’t just do playful learning tools and workshops, we make sites with the educators too.

Here’s some nice screen shots from the work or go view the site.

Now for extra marks please memorise below and wonder how your site would look if we made yours…

eCommerce

All their products are online now and the site has a special eCommerce basket

“Wow that’s easy to use!”

We used the award winning open source… Drupal CMS to quickly build the charity’s new website. Dear god it’s easy for them to use.

Clever user accounts

Clever user accounts. Futurelab Staff can only edit manage what content they need too, so no more “bloggers accidentally deleting the frontpage”.

Dynamic Front Page.

They can write what ever they want in the Hero Box, depends what they need to sell at the time

HTML5!

It’s new and here to stay. Thought Den were one of the first commercial companies to be flying the Drupal flag for HTML5. Yay to future and yay to better SEO

Deep Information search

It searches EVERYTHING. Really it does, so no product is left unfound. We even built them a widget which searches their previous site just in-case anything’s missed.

Facet Search

A bit like the powerful eCommerce site eBay and Play.com, you pick a category and it filters your results.

Now what were the three things you had to remember at the beginning…?

Thing your educational facility needs a sexy site too? email us, curious at thoughtden co United Kingdom

Identity design

Motion graphics

AR marker controlled puzzle

The output!

A little technical rundown

Good performance was at the fore of all minds on the project. How many polygons were too many? Which 3D engine would be quickest? What minimum specs were (un)reasonable? And at what point does tomorrow’s noon deadline become more attainable by going home and sleeping? By hook and crook, we struck the right balance, but not before a few bouts of panic.

In the pursuit of faster marker detection, we started with an Alchemy-compiled version of the FLARToolKit. Alchemy is an Adobe Labs technology that allows C and C++ source code to compile to ActionScript bytecode and be executed in the Flash Player. The advantage that those lower-level languages have over high-level AS3 is great scope for optimised CPU instructions and memory management. But! -using SWCs that other developers have created is akin to buying a car on eBay without seeing any pictures. This particular vehicle was as fast as promised, but leaked oil [memory] at an alarming rate, and would insta-crash on wet tarmac [Google Chrome]. We tried what we could from outside the black box of that precompiled code to resolve the problems, but it became apparent that we’d need to switch over to the more dependable, slower AS3 version, and seek our performance gains elsewhere.

Beyond the FLAR  difficulties were the need to manage dinosaur textures with some sophistication. Trying out the construction game, you’ll see that individual bone segments are alpha-ed down and up independently of the rest of the model. Papervision3D supports this sort of control while the Collada model is rendered with vector fills for textures, but setting a DisplayObject3D’s alpha property with bitmap textures present will quietly do nothing.

Our workaround involved the exposed BitmapData of each texture, and the application of ColorTransforms on a per frame basis. And since such transformations are lossy and non-reversible, a custom tweening function was needed to clone the original pixels at each time step, before reapplying the ColorTransform with an incremented alpha offset. (Intel Celerons, go home.) Where this approach made acute pain for Justin, our 3D modeller, was in the need to break apart the model’s textures into individual materials, for every segment that we wanted to fade in and out. Not knowing the final set of editable bones, we were left with over a hundred separate texture files to manage. And that’s why we’re all sleeping so well these days.

The people that made it possible

A big thanks to the team that worked so hard on this. We have:

Adam Vernon – Lead Flash Development

George Crabtree – Flash Development

Ben Webb – Lead Designer

Justin Dowling – 3D awesomeness

Antoine Kougblenou – Testing / javascripting

Dan Course – Calming words in the eye of the storm

Ben Templeton – Project lead and Creative Direction

Our client contact at the BBC, who has been fantastic, showing incredible support, patience and ambition.

Below is video 01 from our new Geek Club series, charting the Den’s trials, tribulations, banter and revelations. Think Blue Peter, without the bog roll tubes. Or HP Labs, but with less money and more sellotape.

Adam says :

“It makes use of the OSC protocol (likely eventual successor to MIDI), which is normally used to transmit musical and audio control data over UDP. The iPhone app, TouchOSC, is designed to be used as an OSC controller and also supports transmission of accelerometer data, indicating the orientation of the phone. The UDP packets are received by a Java flosc server, running on the PC, which retransmits the OSC data over Flash-friendly TCP. On receipt of a packet, Flash assigns the received orientation values to the rotationX and -Y properties of a cube made with the Flash10 3D API.”

Word on the street is that we’ve moved studio. An official (and thoroughly imaginative) announcement will follow forthwith. Isn’t it a shame that ‘real’ work gets in the way of devising these witty and clever ways to let you know we now stare at different coloured walls when Firefox crashes? Soon your inboxes will sing to the sound of Thought Den’s latest self-indulgent, digital distraction. Curious? You should be…

The project was no small undertaking,
- concept
- branding
- design
- a Squarespace site-build
- social media page branding (Youtube/Twitter)
- working on Good Friday =)

The process
Here’s some sneaky shots of the Thought Den process which produced the sexy results

Who is Florrie?
If you’d like to know who Florrie is, (she will be gracing our radio airwaves and tv sets very soon!). She’s a singer, songwriter and rather importantly a drummer!

Check it all out!
Site – http://www.florrie.com/
Twitter – http://twitter.com/florriemusic
Youtube – http://www.youtube.com/user/florriemusic

Like what we did?
If you’d like to talk about Thought Den’s full branding & online services, please mail ben@thoughtden.co.uk for more details

Here’s a nice little animation we made to explain what it’s for and how it can help. Using Lemmings and a Tortoise. Essential for any ‘How to…’ movie…Enjoy!

The first is very exciting – we were commissioned by the BBC to run a workshop at the Pervasive Media Studio back in October. The brief was to give the hottest new BBC design recruits a taste of pervasive thinking. What better company to run the event than the den thinkers. It was a fun day with talks from the likes of Tom Melamed of Calvium, Luke Jerram and a stand-up brainstorm session on the PM’s monstrous and curving white board. Nick Johnston (Hatboy to most and many) kindly videoed and edited the highlights, so please plug in for 3 minutes of Thought Den magic…And Dan’s hair looks much better this time, eh!?

Another somewhat delayed announcement follows – the igfest 09 highlights reel is in! Geoff Taylor has been hard at it in the edit suite, Simon Johson has been on the phone to his copyright lawyers and I’ve been keeping interested parties happy with taster emails packed with images. But the wait is over, moving picture technology has triumped, gorge at will. What an awesome event it is. Roll on 2010.

igfest 09 from Igfest on Vimeo.

Cloud Computing came to the rescue! We thought our original provision would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, so now the MP3s are hosted on a dedicated whatsit up in the cloud somewhere and are screaming down the thingamajiggers faster than mustard. This is what they say “Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud is an offering which allows users to store data on the Rackspace infrastructure, from 1 byte to 5 Gigbytes.”

Subtlemob site

The Twittersphere is slowly catching on, so all you tweeters make sure you use the hashtag #subtlemob and spread the word. We’ve still got London, Bristol and Liverpool coming up. Download the audio file, grab partner and get on board for a magic piece of crowd theatre.

And as Dan Course himself said after the pioneering Bristol subtlemob earlier this year “Suddenly the world seemed rosier, I was wrapped up in a bubble for 20 minutes, and, um, fell in love with a complete stranger…”