Time’s up on my residency!

It’s time to pack my bags and be on my way to Porto for x-coax and then back home to Madeira (where I’m from). It seems that it was just yesterday that I arrived to Linz with my bags full of expectation (and aguardente ) for my residency at Time’s Up. This great opportunity to spend time among the Time’s Up people was made possible by the collaboration between the research institute where I’m currently working (M-iti), Time’s Up (AT), FoAM (BE) and AltArt (RU) under the Future Fabulators EU funded project. Back at M-iti we (myself together with Valentina Nisi and Julian Hanna) are developing a location based transmedia narrative experience, where physical objects playout an important role in the experience. We actually did a presentation at “Data Ecologies ’14”, check it out here more about the presentation, but we also have a website of FutureFabulators@M-iti.

Anyway since we had this drive to use physical objects to help out in telling the story who better to get insights and learn from than Time’s Up? Moreover, we decided to work together on exploring different interactions between prototyping hardware and multimedia content. Something that could be beneficial for both M-iti and Time’s up to use in their individual projects being developed under the Future Fabulators project. So over 4 weeks I worked around experimenting with integrating Arduinos, RFID readers and sensors together with Android devices in order to trigger multimedia content. Different approaches (a lot of them! Most didn’t work bahhh) were tried to achieved the goal. I discovered that using an Android device to control and trigger multimedia based on the Arduino input it is still not widely spread (sadly for me :) ).

But!! There was a light at the end of the tunnel, one solution found was to use a native android application (written in Java) serving as a bridge between the Arduino and an HTML page to show the multimedia content (HTML + Javascript). Iey!! So as a result of this residency we have the beginning for what can be a platform/medium between users/players and multimedia content that can be used in different experiences designed at both M-iti and at Time’s Up. Also, there was the time to get feedback and some inputs from Time’s up on the transmedia story that M-iti is working on – The Laura Silva lost book.

HTML page receiving input from potentiometer (2)

But! Not all of my residency was work! There was the time for bike rides around Linz, enjoy delicious meals (desert included every single time… nhammii) with the Time’s up crew, I even went on a small boat ride in the Donau in Tim’s boat. Pippa shown me the best places to by schnaps and other Austrian goodies. And last but not least, and thanks to Tina and Gin, an awesome trip to the mountains (uff my experience in Austria would not be complete without mountains).