Day 1

I had planned the perfect schedule where I would meet friends in 3 different cities. As the morning I was due to leave approached, the first thing to go wrong was the busses not running and so couldn’t get to the train station. So I took a taxi. Getting to the airport via the solid Dutch rail network was as easy as always, however the train was late so I was worried I was about to miss the morning flight. When I got the airport, I checked in my bag with all the gifts and was informed the flight was delayed for 2 hours. I wasn’t really surprised, the snow was building up all over the country. I waited, took coffee and read my books. The flight information kept changing, 3 hours, 4 hours.. Then it said cancelled. So I went to the information desk, where I waited for another 2 hours where they tried to deal with everyone waiting. I was offered another flight to another UK city in the evening, which I accepted. My plan was back on track, I rearranged my plans in the UK, somewhere to stay and transport from the airport. The plane was due to leave at 9pm. I waited. As 9pm arrived the display’s said the flight was delayed, then.. cancelled. I went back to the information desk where the queues were so long the staff were bringing out water and sandwiches for people. At this point I knew it was hopeless to think I would be in the UK tonight. There were people saying the airline would book me a hotel near Schiphol, however looking at the queues I realised that this hotel probably wouldn’t have space for me or that there might be someone more in need of it and so tried to get back to Leiden. The Dutch train network I had so come to respect earlier on in the day was now letting me down.

None of the trains were going to Leiden. I asked the NS staff and they kept saying there will be one in half an hour, for 4 hours there was none in half an hour. I watched the displays. They couldn’t be trusted, nothing was working in this amazing rail system. Finally one old industrial looking train turned up on another platform and the driver shouted “This is to Leiden ONLY!” – I ran up the escalators and down again to the platform and made the train. On the journey I called the only person I knew left to be in Leiden and asked if they could help me out- they did and brought me a bike to the station. The snow was thick and heavy, cycling another 5km was hard work, luckily I left all the gifts in my bag checked in at the airport. I relaxed, called my Mum and told her the situation.

Day 2

I called the airline, they never answered. I kept trying. After 3 hours I got though and they told me they couldn’t put me on a flight for that night as I booked though a travel agency and they would have to rearrange the flight, but they couldn’t get though to the airlines as they were dealing with their direct customers. They also said at present it doesn’t look as though the evening flight would be taking off anyway as so might be better to come to the airport where they could deal with me directly. I cycled to the train station. The trains to the airport were out of service. I gave up for the day and went to get a nice cup of tea with my Leiden friend.

Day 3

As soon as I awoke I could feel the sunlight on my face, oh what a feeling- cold but warm at the same time. I cycled into the train station- the trains to the airport were running! I got to schiphol around 10am and went straight to the information desk. I saw the beginning of the queue. I was searching for the end of it… I walked.. walked and walked this was the biggest queue I have ever seen! When I eventually found the end of it there was a airline representative which asked my about my situation. She agreed I was in the right place and in the right queue. I was shocked. I kept calling the my travel agent, who informed me they had a lesser priority in sorting out tickets than me being at the airport and so should just wait. So I did. The queue was so slow. I finished one of my books and started a new one. I couldn’t leave the queue as I was travelling alone and so drank the provided drinks infrequently and we passed a toilet around 4 hours into waiting. Around 6pm I was getting close, I could see the desk I was going to be processed at. She told me all the flights had been cancelled to my original destination, but there is one special flight arranged for a Liverpool footballer, Ryan Babel, which had a couple of seats left but will be leaving in 10 min – she told me to run! So I did! Getting though passport control, security and getting to the gate was a challenge but they waited for me and I got on the plane! Finally, it felt like progress. I was sat on a very small plane with only 3 rows of seats, two on one side and one be the window. It had propellers! The football player was sat at the front talking to the captain just before he announced- “We have to wait to have our wings sprayed by a special chemical before we can set off.” I waited again. Two hours later 2 vans with cranes attached appeared and started to spray the plane. One stopped halve way through. Seems it wasn’t working.. half an hour later another one turned up, however this meant we had missed out flight window in the queue and had to wait for yet another one. Just before midnight the engines started, the propellers were turning and there was a cheer though the cabin.

I landed in Liverpool at 1am. I was so happy to be home. I waited for my baggage, I was almost sure it wouldn’t be there and it wasn’t. I then ran though the airport to the coach station for the last coach into the city on the day before Christmas eve. I met my friends, then family and had a very good Christmas, however no one had their presents. I called the airports and the airline several times, it wasn’t until new years eve until they found my bag, still at Schiphol airport. On the morning of the 2nd January, the day before I was to return to the Netherlands, there was a knock at the house I was staying at with my bag. I finally handed some of my friends their presents and set off for the journey back to Leiden.

This year we have heard it so many times in the news that there is Chaos at the airports. I have had first hand experience of it. We can only plan so far as one tiny thing can change every expectation you have ever made.

Today we can travel anywhere on the planet, yet it may not be as simple as you expect. The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.

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Sound Space Interaction 2009

MAX/MSP is a great application to build an interactive sound environment. When we realised how we could connect to external inputs to MAX MSP from a Wii-mote, we got quite excited about building an interactive game using just sound in a space.

Our plan was to build a ‘lightsaber’ purely in sound. We researched how the sound designer Ben Burtt originally build the saber sounds for the hit film series ‘Star Wars’. The lightsaber is a sword with a column of brightly coloured energy in the place of a metal blade. We learned that the sound for the device, created in the 1970s, was made with totally analogue technology from source sounds such as the static of an un-tuned television and replayed though a speaker, then re-recorded live with feedback from microphone waved around in from of the speaker.

The available data provided by the Wii-mote produces values for the yaw, pitch, roll, acceleration and it has an extra infra-red camera. This meant we could not detect values for if the Wii-mote was swung around 360 degrees, only 270. In trying to cobat this limitation we tried using the built in infra-red detection, which proved much more complicated and was using up too much time whilst not really enhancing of the experience, and so decided to create the game limited to the 270 degree angle.

Using Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.wiiremote object, we took in the values from the Wii remote and mapped the panning and saber sound to a quadraphonic audio set up though a MUTO device. (Careful here as it seems some of the drivers can cause problems, both on Mac OS and windows systems- personally I went though no less than 12 kernel panics after installing the MOTU drivers, in part I think because of the previously installed soundflower software from Cycling 74).

Our original plan was to use 2 of the sabers in 2 rooms so you could fight a ‘fight with the invisible enemy’, however we couldn’t agree a good way on how the fight could be won or lost in this scenario and so came up with an alternative and more exciting proposition relating to when the Jedi Knights are in training. In the story, the ‘younglings’ (children born with strong sensitivity to the Force) are trained to use their light-sabers blindfolded, so they should use ‘the force’ to engage with small laser-firing drones sending out small ‘lightly painful’ laser beam to the subject which was either absorbed or reflected by the light saber.

This presented an interesting proposition to build a sound-based laser battle ground, with lasers flying in from any direction and be deflected by the soundsaber we’d built. To do this we used a quadraphonic 2D speaker set up and placed sounds between them .We used the Freeverb~ object to position the saber sound and the lasers.

The objective was to build a 1 or 2 player game in a single or pair of rooms, which meant there needed to be a competitive element in the game. This challenge resulted in a the idea of an audio representation of a haze, where the player would  have increasing difficulty in locating where the laser sounds were originating from. In a single room set-up this means for every miss there would be an increase in a futuristic noise sound, in keeping with the laser and saber sounds. In a dual room set-up every hit would increase the noise sound to the other room, making it more difficult for your opponent to detect the incoming laser sounds.

The resulting project works very well in a single room and with further development could be refined much more to give an engaging sonic battle experience. Next steps would include attempting to build the project in a 3D sound environment and further define the sound design to compensate to different sizes of playing fields and work on other solutions for turning 360 degress in the room.

If you would like to set up yourself or play with the patches, you can download the source here.

Enjoy!

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 This is the original edit:

These guys are working on it too:
http://compare-everywhere.com/

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I’ve been selected to make a work about what I feel it’s all about.. I’ve attached that video as a separate post, Hack ‘n Shop.

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Anyway the year starts for me with a trip to Ars Electronica which this year is all about the Cultural Economy. This fits great with Lost Angels and the other projects I’m working on at the moment, so I’m really looking forward to it.

But my favorite part of the festival is always the results of PrixArts, the international competition of CyberArts. I always find inspiration here, and this will be my 4th visit.

Sleeping in a youth hostel with a bunch of recent BA/BSc grad students after an overnight coach trip may not be my cuppa tea though, I like nice clean hotels after business class flights, but student living is fun, I guess.

If you can’t go though, why not check the streaming? They have live webcasts and podcasts, so jkust pop it in your iTunes!

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Graphic by Casper Schipper

Do people work better together or alone?

We have created a puzzle based interactive installation to explore the possibilities of this question. The simple ‘Untangle’ game has been around for years as a small game made by computer scientists which uses various algorithms to search for intersections between nodes. It has a number of nodes connected by lines and the aim of the game is to move the nodes, along with the lines connecting them so that no line crosses over another. As the game goes up in levels the more intersections there are and the more complex the puzzle becomes to solve. We have taken a different approach to interacting with the game, instead of one person moving one node at once, we allow multiple players to move many nodes at the same time.

Method

We created a playing field and used motion recognition system to track ‘blobs’ as people entering the area. On this playing field we project our puzzle of nodes and lines ready to be solved. We created pre-existing set levels, and therefore data of the number of players and time it takes to solve the puzzle can be compared and our results will show us how well people work together, along with exploring some of the latest technological advances in image recognition and interactive pervasive gaming environments. It was important to us that the players didn’t have to do anything special in order to interact with our installation.

Set up

Simply walking on to the playing field is all we want our participants to do, yet provide these protagonists with a rich, immersive and challenging experience as we collect the data for this research. We placed a webcam above our playing field and used blob detection in the c# programming environment which passed information to an Adobe Flash application which is the game engine. Another Flash application was created to display the high scores though a separate projection on the wall.

Download Installation Requirements here

What do people need to do?

People need to solve a puzzle game. Depending on the number of players, this game can be played by one up to eight players simultaneously. The goal of the game is to solve a untangle puzzle as quick as possible; the less time it takes to complete the game, the higher the score will be. The game is collaborative: this means all players will have to team up in order to solve the puzzle.

Image by Casper Schipper

The game is to be played physically. People control the game by moving around in a physical space. The game consists of a number of nodes, each connected to other nodes by at least two lines. Players can move the nodes around freely, aiming to remove all intersections between these lines. The moment no intersecting lines remain, the puzzle is solved and the game is finished.

Check out Casper’s website for other projects here.

Subscribe to Lieven’s YouTube account to see the other great projects he’s working on here.

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