This is one of a serious of posts about the Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop at the Serious Games Institute on Tues, 4 March.

After coffee Ron Edwards (Ambient Performance) kicked things off talking about mobile & location based goodness. His ambition was to ‘Be where the eyeballs are’. The most recent project was Creative Encounter - in partnership with Black Ridge Games. Ron also talked about a game, Dockers dilemma (a mix of Flashlite and mscapes). Although the game was focused on the mobile device and potentially very individualistic, it turned out that game play was very collaborative. Ron also demo’d a streaming technology from his N95 that looked a bit Qik’ish.

David Buden (Daden Ltd) did some Second Life flythroughs, after the obligatory graphics glitches. A very cool mash up was a live feed of LAX flight data (delayed by a minute so you couldn’t use it for missile targeting) and displayed in 3D so you walk through the flight paths and see the busiest routes. A slightly more ‘fun’ data visualisation project was the Twitter fountain. This polled the
Twitter public stream and posted twit’s as small bubbles that slowly floated up in the air and disappeared into the sky. Quite relaxing to watch. I wasn’t on wifi at the time so wasn’t twittering myself (though I did get this sorted after lunch).
He then teamed up with Martyn again to show off a 3D audio VR-RL mash-up that moved the sound of his avatar walking around SL around the real-life conference room using the 3D audio software from Martyn and some MIDI sound cues from SL. That wasn’t quite so cool because of lag on the Second Life connection.

During lunch we all had ample opportunity to do the networking thing. In addition to the speakers and some University types, I got chatting to Tom Williams (MD Bessacarr Publications) about their work producing conventional guides to heritage sites and their moves into the digital space, to Mike Short (VP R&D, O2) about mobile applications, pervasive media, and the current Technology Strategy Board funding; Clayton Shaw (Arts Council England about all things digital, arty and socially media & mediated, and Geny Calosi (Assistant Editor for AV Publishing about pervasive media, social media, and University/Industry collaboration. There were about 50 folks all told so a very good mix of interests and perspectives.