Future hunt completed
Ars Electronica 2008 report
We arrived in Linz on Sunday night with nothing but high hopes and five GPS mobile phones.
I met my contact later that night in the lobby of the Arcotel in Linz and received the target locations, pictures and info about the art installations as well as five Austrian prepaid data cards. In preparation the nice people of CScout (Antonia, hello, thanks!) had identified and photographed a number of Ars Electronica outdoor exhibits.
By the way, if you live in Austria or want to go to Austria, get THIS SIM CARD and play GPS Mission as long as you want without ever thinking about your internet cost again!
Next morning we were all set to go. We needed two missions that include the outdoor exhibits as checkpoints by thirteen-hundred. In addition we wanted to test walk the missions and customize a KML stream of player’s positions and way marks. The entire morning was a demonstration of the simplicity of the mission design tool.
The missions were up quite fast. Unfortunately Austrian reality didn’t work as smooth as the tool. I was still test walking our second mission ten minutes before we were on – checkpoint 2 was unreachable because of a construction site. The pedestrian bridge that I wanted people to walk over to get to the Danube river was in repair and inaccessible!
Luckily the futurologists of MISSION FUTURE had run late and were behind their talking schedule. So, we had two extra minutes in the hallway fixing the checkpoints, complete with dicey WLAN and excitement.
I gave a short five minute presentation about the FutureHunt (and GPS Mission). During the following lunch-break attendees borrowed the GPS phones from us and played the missions.
Our KML feed became a nice virtual footprint of the activity. The KML feed is the best way to look at the results – it includes all pictures taken by attendees as well as their walking tracks.
We learned a lot from the user feedback, thanks! It was a fun and interesting event – Thanks to the people of CScout (Philippe, etc.!) for giving us the chance to do the FutureHunt!
We hope to do a new and improved version next time!
Finally: Our personal pick for best-of-show were the guys who created the Reactable – but they are already YouTube celebrities.
I met my contact later that night in the lobby of the Arcotel in Linz and received the target locations, pictures and info about the art installations as well as five Austrian prepaid data cards. In preparation the nice people of CScout (Antonia, hello, thanks!) had identified and photographed a number of Ars Electronica outdoor exhibits.
By the way, if you live in Austria or want to go to Austria, get THIS SIM CARD and play GPS Mission as long as you want without ever thinking about your internet cost again!
Next morning we were all set to go. We needed two missions that include the outdoor exhibits as checkpoints by thirteen-hundred. In addition we wanted to test walk the missions and customize a KML stream of player’s positions and way marks. The entire morning was a demonstration of the simplicity of the mission design tool.
The missions were up quite fast. Unfortunately Austrian reality didn’t work as smooth as the tool. I was still test walking our second mission ten minutes before we were on – checkpoint 2 was unreachable because of a construction site. The pedestrian bridge that I wanted people to walk over to get to the Danube river was in repair and inaccessible!
Luckily the futurologists of MISSION FUTURE had run late and were behind their talking schedule. So, we had two extra minutes in the hallway fixing the checkpoints, complete with dicey WLAN and excitement.
I gave a short five minute presentation about the FutureHunt (and GPS Mission). During the following lunch-break attendees borrowed the GPS phones from us and played the missions.
KML screenshot - watch this in Google Earth.
Our KML feed became a nice virtual footprint of the activity. The KML feed is the best way to look at the results – it includes all pictures taken by attendees as well as their walking tracks.
We learned a lot from the user feedback, thanks! It was a fun and interesting event – Thanks to the people of CScout (Philippe, etc.!) for giving us the chance to do the FutureHunt!
We hope to do a new and improved version next time!
Finally: Our personal pick for best-of-show were the guys who created the Reactable – but they are already YouTube celebrities.