What a blast! We went up to Stockholm by bus last Tuesday and arrived at around 5.30 pm. Everyone got off and checked out the Hyper Island Stockholm facilities, which were impressing! The following two days were spent getting our installations ready at the exhibition area, but not without having some time over to check out the city!

Then came exhibition day, which was really fun. I’m not sure how many people came or how many that played our game, but I can say it was a success! There were people everywhere, mingling and experiencing the different projects we’d created. I also stumbled upon Nico up in Stockholm (DM09STO), which was nice. As to which class performed the best? No idea. I was very impressed with many of the Stockholm class’ projects as well as my fellow class mates from Karlskrona so I can’t really decide. It was very interesting to see the different outcomes and styles of our creations even though they blossomed from the same types of technology.

I was in a discussion panel about the tech surrounding the project, which was a little bit odd since I’m not a tech guy per se. But there I was, sitting in a group with other Hypers discussing the programming bits and what it was like in front of a camera crew.

All in all this module has been a very frustrating, but incredibly rewarding, experience.

Today’s been a pretty good, laid back first day up here in Stockholm. We were supposed to get to school at around 11.30 am, and when I’m walking towards school I see Sarah, Alexander, Nella, Stian and Lil’ K coming towards me. They’re going into the city to eat lunch. I tag along.

We walk around for a while trying to find someplace to eat (which is hard being six and all). We end up at Pizza Hut by Hötorget where I can’t remember the name of “selleri”. I spend a good fourty-five minutes scratching my non-existent beard and calling up people (even asking the local staff), but to no avail. Finally we went by some fruit and vegetable stands and there it was. The “selleri”.

After that we go to Åhlens to get some cloth for Alex’s group.

We get back to school at a while past three o’clock and everything is set up and rocking. Since we’ve made everything in Karlskrona and tested it there, all we needed to do was to connect a cable to the projector. Turns out speakers for the sound was included in our spot, so John didn’t even had to bring his. We really do have the perfect spot at the exhibition. It’s close (relatively, at least) to the entrance and the projector is big and awesome.

This evening we’re going out for a beer or two to celebrate, but tomorrow it’s presentation at school at 9 in the morning. We originally had one of the latest time spots but Robin and Max’s group wasn’t going to be done in time so we had to switch.

It’s Sunday today but I still went to school to fix some things, so we’ll take it a bit easy tomorrow. The biggest bugs are now officially squashed, which is a huge burden of our chests. I also put in the ending when you’ve reached the final level of the game.

John is still trying to find a way to get the motion background in the end. We’ll see how it works out.

There’s not very much left to be done on the project, actually. There’s some minor things like screwing the RFID reader to the box and getting a cord for the projector, but apart from that the actual coding and interface is done!

It’s getting better and better. The game, that is. Everything seems to be circling around that at the moment. Today me, John and Eliot went to the printers’ to get our print out. It looked really good. 218 crowns, though. What the heck, you’re only young once, right? Today I got all of the levels in, plus the “prepare for next level” fly-by’s. We spent one and a half hour (yes, hour) to try to carry it to Ångan and trying to make it work with the projector there. It didn’t work. Finally we got it back to Häktet and we borrowed a projector to try it out.

Except for a few small bugs there’s not much left to do on the game. Things of concern: we must get a Mac cable for projecting the image. We also must mount the RFID reader under the top of the box.

Today we’ve added some felt to the backside of our wooden letters, with the RFID tags baked inside. We’ve also rendered out most of the interface and gotten it to work in Flash. The one thing we’re still struggling with, however, is the background video loop of stars flying around in space. We’re unable to get a .flv file that looks good enough, and we’ve tried using .swf but the files end up way too big.

We’ve got most of the sound effects in and have selected music. It looks gooood.

Here’s some photos of what we’re doing.

At the moment me and John are working on the code and interface elements. There are still some minor bugs in the code that need to be worked out and that’s what I’m sitting with. At the moment, you can swipe a letter to the reader even when the game is showing the level sequence. That’s something that needs to be fixed. On the level side we have four at the moment, of a total of around 10. Tim has been calling around trying to get a hold of a projector and Mathias has been running around to a lot of different meetings. Even though things have been slowing down a bit I still feel confident in us being ready in time for the exhibition.

Yesterday I thought I was going to cry myself to sleep. Today, though, is a completely different story. Much thanks goes out to Åsmund, who helped me understand the way our project was supposed to be coded, and also to Max, who helped me actually do it. Due to the efforts of these two gentlemen, my group is now on its way to achieving victory, fame and glory up in Stockholm in two weeks.

Today’s been a good day! First we had a lecture by Henry Brook of Digit and then me and Eliot went to get some color. The guy at the paint store only had white, but since it was free we happily walked out of there with 4 liters of paint.

The Experience Technology module has started at full effect and we’re currently in our cells trying to research on ways to make our project a reality. Our idea is based on a memory type of mind game which John in my group has devised. Tim and Eliot have been out getting wood so we can build a box to house the computer in.

The technology we got assigned to us was the Phidget RFID kit. Last Friday we sat down and had a brainstorming session where we basically just tried to come up with a bunch of different ideas. In the brainstorming process some of the ideas were very far out there and some were more “doable” in the sense of time and within the range of our skills. Since none of the members of our group are self-acclaimed “coders” or “technies” I felt that it was important for us to focus on what we actually could accomplish rather than spend time on complex and, in effect, impossible ideas. We have also heard that most groups that struggle at the exhibition are the ones that have took upon them too much. The keyword, it seems, is to keep things simple. At the end of the day we decided to roll with John’s mind game idea.

The basic concept is taken from the game Memory and then upgraded with new technology and tweaked to be more fast-paced. We have been very ambitious with our ideas and thoughts on how our space at the exhibition should look like and we have a pretty good idea of how things should work. Tim and Eliot have already begun searching around for the physical resources like wood and Plexiglas that we need for the project. Me and John are looking into the coding part, which will be based on Action Script 3.0. Mathias is our project manager and is also in the exhibition group which will handle the practical issues surrounding the event.

We haven’t really run into that many problems yet, besides the fact that we’re still sort of new to the whole thing and don’t really know exactly what we should be doing all the time.

Since I’m not very “techie” as a person, I decided to challenge myself and try to be a part of the coding process for this very reason. Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute with something, but for the moment I’m mostly just looking on, pointing a finger here and there and speaking my mind when I have something to say.

Today we’ve had workshops with Stefanie Wuschitz who is an artist working in the technological space and uses it as a tool for her creations. We got an assignment to come up with something based on a word. My group’s word was “bandwidth”. We made an old school string phone which actually worked. We didn’t really expect that.

This afternoon we’re going to do some java programming and put the results on our mobile phones.

Today we’ve been listening to Robin Gavin and also brainstormed for cool concepts we would like to build. My group, consisting of myself, Koste, Max, Nella and Sara, came up with the fantastic idea of taking the old school scarecrows, but pimping them for the 21st century. We call it Android: Robotic Scarecrow.

Today we had our first introduction to our new module “Experience technology” with Petter Wärnsberg. It was a pretty thorough introduction and it looks like we’re going to have about two month’s work ahead of us, but one month to actually do it. It looks like I’m going to have four hectic, but interesting, weeks ahead of me. The module’s aim is to get us to dive into the tech bit, which is something that I personally haven’t really touched on that much in the past. I’ve done my share of small javascripts and RealBasic programming in my youth, but nothing beyond that. PHP for example, would be something neat to try out. Action Script and Ajax-stuff as well.