The finalists were given 30 minutes to access any tools they required before having the internet disabled from their machines, also no speaking or communication tools were allowed. At the sound of a gong the problems flashed up on the screens and battle commenced! It was a serious business as around 40 guys had their hearts set on winning a trip to Mountain View, CA for the world finals on the 14th of November, the possibility of a very nice cash prize and recruitment opportunities.

Google say it's all about giving something back to the community and also talent spotting to recruit new developers into the Google fold. Code Jam has been running for 5 years and last year's winner, who now works in Google's Moscow office, designed this year's competition tool. The platform for the competition is not presently open source, but is being reviewed for open source release. Although no female developers made it into this round, Google say they have seen a significant increase in female registration from Code Jam 2006.

There were seven successful Code Jammers who will going through, good luck to them for the final in Mountain View in November!

Read on for a few snippets of the talks...

Ian talked about data portability and the importance of web users being able to control their profiles and data. Controlling our identity online is very difficult and a subject not to be approached lightly! He mentioned The Bill of Rights for social web users, which asserts that a user has rights online.

He also talked about how identity is a difficult and complicated area, particuarly with social media sites and mentioned that OpenID is one way to control your identity online.

So who owns what? We should all be using sites that allow distribution to our content via Creative Commons licence - it's a flexible way to control the rights and freedoms to use your work - if you're using a site that doesn't use CC - you should be wary of adding your content to it. You should also read your ULAs - user licence agreements - to check who owns your profile, content and views before you add them and if you can delete your data when you want to move on.

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Philip Butler, University of London computer centre - Personalisation

In his opinion the future of technology is going to be about gadgets that just do what they're supposed to do - he's not a technologist himself and doesn't need to know how technology works.

He's very busy and doesn't have much time to spend with his students, he usually gets to see a student for 15-20 mins a term and has to look up his students notes beforehand to remind himself. With this in mind, he feels the challenge is how do we make effective learning tools to suit the pedagogy. Learning culture is shifting it's no longer about passive learning, but utilising the tools available to us placing the learner at the centre.

He showed us a personalisation framework called LearnZone which allows students to add their goals, what their barriers to learning are and more. He mentioned that this was inspired by the BBC's Learning websites.

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Miles Metcalf, Ravensbourne College - Campus of the future

Miles talked about the challenges of IT in colleges, about user-owned technology and how empowering it is. His vision of the future included using some of the money spent on computer labs to subsidise personal technology. Provide higher-end resources and integrate with user-owned workflows. He mentioned how not long ago that software was designed where user experience didn't matter - his has changed. He says what IT departments aren't used to is users taking over their ports with their P2P stuff. What is tomorrow's IT department? Is it a defender of scarce resource and arbiter of fair use? Are we in an age of enterprise transformation?

He says it's about the pedagogy - it's a coherent pedagogy where today's students can become the practitioners and a negotiate public identity, Integrating extra-institutional practice into their institutional-bound learning - it's a personal learning environment via a social stack of software.

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Tim Marshal - CEO JANET(UK)

He opened with asking how can the people who are presently teaching keep up with evolving technology fast enough to train the next generation? It's a big challenge! He talked about seeing a Quantel Paintbox at a car boot sale. Once upon a time this was the cutting egde of digital imagery technology 20 years ago. He gave a brief talk about the evolution of TV formats from 405 line black and white, to the present.

Tim talked about Ultra High Definition TV and the recent groundbreaking SHV live link with London and the IBC in Amsterdam, which featured an interview with Erik Huggers.

Future of high-definition - uses:

* Communication
* Sharing - our stuff
* Teaching - great for learning eg medical
* Learning
* Research - hi-def cameras on sea bed - collecting data for analysis
* Creating - creative industries opportunities
* Innovating - all sorts

Challenges

* Financing considerations - hi-def is an expensive bit of kit at the moment, but there's ways of mitigating this - ie sharing kit
* Don't let the people who want to stop you from doing things stop you from innovating
* Be inventive and work in multidisciplinary teams - ie use the resources we have
* Leadership, UK has a lot of talented people, but needs to be more collaborative and joined up.
* Don't forget to make sure our students have the very best - don't forget them when planning and thinking about technology in education

They were investigating 3 hypotheses

1. Fine arts graduates are highly skilled in innovation: there are two approaches to innovation - one is a rational approach and other is willingness to take risks. They say that the second approach is highly developed in artists.

2. There’s an argument that the way artists work and cultural innovation is the way we’re presently heading: there’s more casualisation of work, more project or portfolio work. Question: do the way artists’ work resemble other ways of working?

3. Notion of aesthetics is now everywhere: lots of products have a high aesthetic component, from running shoes to what you drink. For example, people buy a particular brand of shoe because of their aesthetic taste.

Some policy could help fine arts graduates feel more confident about their skills and prepare them to consider options in the wider labour market, as well as encouraging businesses to think of them when recruiting.



Some snippet observations about fine arts graduates and innovation pulled from the survey:

* Work in a interpretive, innovative way
* Are adaptive, risk taking and problem solving


* Are likely to be lifelong learners


* Characterise themselves as brokers across disciplines
* Use process of discovery, aided but not directed by experts


* Willingness to change, adapt or try new things


* Keen to keep their personal art going as well as career


* Those who list their primary occupation as within the arts, 40% have a second job


* Are adept at switching jobs between sectors

Panel Q & A session with the audience:

Q: Who is the audience for this research? A: Apart from the fine arts grads themselves, it is the innovation policy people in the context of how art links with work. How the flow of creative services flows into work.

Q: Is there any crossover? A: If you look at something like video games, music – you see art school graduates in abundance here. They saw lots working in the broader creative industries. Didn’t find many working outside this, they bend over backwards to stay in the creative industries

Q: How different do you think your findings would be if you’d engaged with designers instead of fine artists?
Yes, we would have found different answers, but we wanted to do a specific survey with fine arts graduates because they’re the most far removed from the generic work ethic and in some terms are considered ‘the most useless’ graduates and who weren’t being trained for anything specific.

Q:You said that fine art needs originality, but all areas have originality – there’s a difference between invention and innovation.
 A: Not many interviewees use the word ‘innovation’ when describing how they work - you have to look at how they are describing their own innovation and inventions.

The event was born out of Mashed08, where Christian Heilmann presented a prototype for accessibility, which gained so much interest that he decided that accessibility was an area that needed to be looked into a lot further. From this Christian came up with the idea for the Scripting Enabled event and said in his opening remarks: ‘Open your ears, hearts and minds – if we remove some of the barriers then we are on the way to win already!’

All in all, this was a great day and I heard a lot of passionate and enlightening stuff. The videos are presently being transcribed and I'll link to them as well as mentioning any updates from the Scripting Enabled event as soon as I have them. Details on the talks can be found in the extended entry...

Denise is passionate about good design, she has a condition which means her needs change on a daily basis, she uses a mixture of tools to help her with tasks most of us take for granted and the web has often been her lifeline to friends, resources and entertainment. Frustrated by dull and inadequately designed products Denise created and runs Enabled by Design, an online community who help each other find assistive products and equipment. They aim to make independent living more accessible by innovative design principles. They would like to make design accessible, aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable - often the disability experience is serious and not much fun. Christian summed up how many disabled people feel: ‘Just because I need some aids my flat shouldn’t look like a cheap hospital’ They want to spread the concept of Universal Design - the design of products for everyone and designed to make them easier to use for as many needs as possible and they aim to set up focus groups to liaise with designers. In December there’s a social innovation camp and everyone is invited, including developers, to find out more, get in touch via http://enabledbydesign.org

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Kath Moonan, Abilitynet - Why I hate the interweb!

Kath's heart sinks when people say to her they hate using the internet. Some users get such a bum deal that they only use the internet when they have to and it's especially sad that most of the fun stuff isn’t accessible.

Why is the web still not accessible?
* It’s still prohibitive and expensive!
* Assistive technologies not fit for purpose?
* A lot of users don’t know about the good stuff!

Kath works for Abiltynet, who work to improve accessibility for disabled people and they conduct very diverse tests with varied users. Many of the issues they come up against reflect patterns of needs for different groups of users. She feels that if we solve many of these needs then we will have a good user experience for everyone. Abilitynet sent out a survey to their users asking about issues they have and what their wish list would be and they got a really broad range of what their users needs are. She emphasised that you need to be really careful not to pigeon-hole people and treat everyone as an individual – everyone has different needs and many people have a mixture of needs.

Amongst disabled users, there is a great gap in technological knowledge and experience, many have been burnt in the past and have had problems for example with installing software. YouTube isn't great for screen reader users, common issues include page layout being too crowded and with no heirachy, as well as the typography being hard to read and problems with Flash.

Kath has collected lots of user quotes together: forms, scrolling, typography, too much tabbing and complex layouts are a few of the things which make using the interweb really hard. We heard about how Facebook is really difficult for visually impaired users to use and is now even harder to use since they updated the design. Jaws users report that Flash is ‘inaccessible full stop’ and so they skip it. A steep learning curve is a real barrier to a lot of users using the web. Forms, especially on travel sites are really hard to use and time consuming. Custom stylesheets should also be on the accessibility for the web wish list.

During question time Kath was asked about online games, she said in the 2.5 years she’s been at Abiltynet they’ve never had anyone from the gaming industry talk to them. Apparently there’s some research going on at City University with Second Life and Kath emphasised the importance of exploring fun and leisure issues. The audience was asked if they were interested in games? The answer was a resounding yes!

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Antonia Hyde, United Response - Opening doors: online content for people with learning disabilities

United Response was set up over 30 years ago and they work with up to 1500 people at any one time. They support people with learning disabilities and mental health needs as well as people with physical disabilities.

There’s over one million people in the UK with a learning disability, this covers a wide range of conditions - these affect some people moderately, some seriously – but they all have common factor that they have a condition that impairs their way of learning. There’s no quick fix solution though as there’s no typical person, for example people have different communication preferences, many can live normally, keep a job, etc, but some find it very difficult to live without a lot of help.

Barriers to using the web
• Log in/out – where to go
• Captcha
• Navigation / information architecture
• Content – what is a website about?
• Control
• Generating content – user interaction

How do people use the web? Often with someone else to help and support them. There’s some great innovation around AT (assistive technology) for people with learning disabilities.

Key points
• People feel excluded
• Possible solutions: bigger pictures less text
• Break down sites into chunks with easy to read text
• Be inclusive
• Don’t create disability ghettos
• Balancing the ‘specialist vs mainstream’ – making both accessible and in both directions
• Making online language more accessible
• Include people with learning disabilities in the accessibility debate
• Use images / symbols instead of text

Widgit is a language that you can make pages with pictures. Symbols are a language to get across content, grown out of a need to communicate and there's a huge amount of interesting stuff to be found around the use of symbols browsers. The difficulty is that are these are languages and software that you have to pay for and need a licence to use. Symbols are icons with a lot of politics – open symbols would be good!

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Leonie Watson & Artur Ortega – Screen readers and JavaScript

What's out there:
Technologies that are available for people with visual impairments cross a lot of medical conditions, from clouded sight to colour blindness and also people with corrective sight conditions. The longer we live, the more chance we’ll suffer from visual impairments. People use various technologies such as screen readers, browser functionality and magnifiers. A screen reader turns text into electronic speech or brail on a refreshable brail display. So far Windows has been the dominant operating system that accessibility technology has been developed for and it is quite expensive, although Apple have recently introduced a screen reader to their operating system which is free. On Linux you have all sorts of choices, for example: Orca, Emacspeak and Speakup. System Access to Go will install itself and is a good one to look at if you haven’t had a go of a screen reader before. Lunar and Freedom Scientific's Magic are popular windows apps. There are comprehensive integrated packages within Mac and Linux systems, custom style sheets and apps are good for interfacing with browsers and web widgits are useful for accessing web content.

Screen readers and how they work with web pages:
Forget about your mouse, screen readers work with pages in a linear way, it can be irritating, slow and frustrating - but quick navigation keys can help this process. To read a web page there needs to be an underlying mark-up in the page in the first place – if there’s no hooks then there’s no way of getting through the page quickly.

Most of the popular screen readers have a virtual buffer which interacts with web content, for example when a page loads the screen reader takes a virtual snapshot and allows shortcut keys to interact with the page and navigate around it. Web 2.0 technology has created more problems for screen readers, making it difficult to work out pages and changes, this can also be a very slow process and is not always accurate. JavaScript works with a virtual buffer to improve accessibility.

Some accessibility wish list items:
• an application that looking up images instead of words
• custom stylesheets – so you can have your own preference for colours and fonts on favourite webpages. Also, when you visit a site again your custom stylesheet will be linked to a cookie
• searchable flash and subtitling, so hearing impaired people can listen to Flash content

Damon Rose from BBC Ouch said that Facebook was probably the messiest site on the internet for a JAWS user. Submit buttons for changing status are hidden for JAWS users, headings and page structures too, but the real problem is the applications that are running on top of Facebook because generally they’re not built by people who are thinking about accessibility. Artur has had a look at the new Facebook design and he feels it’s worse than the old one. Many developers who make applications for Facebook don’t realise that they’re creating inaccessible applications.

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Jonathan Hassle – Head of Accessibility, BBC – Dyslexia Barriers

As the subject of games came up earlier in the day, Jonathan briefly talked about gaming and accessibility. Gaming is a very visual and aural medium and descriptive subtitling is very important, for example, if you're playing a game you need to know that someone is coming up behind you to kill you and if you're missing this information you're not going to get very far in a game. All the commands and controls should be accessible by tabbing and if you want to see some tabbing in action look at one-key Space Invaders and Chess at OneSwitch.org In 3D immersive worlds such as Second Life there has been some work to make it accessible and fun, for example people with mobility difficulties have enjoyed engaging in pursuits such as flying and visual audio will help you have fun if your visually impaired. Jonathan emphasised how games designers should have a 'multi-modal' approach to building games and immersive worlds and think across all disabilities.

Jonathan went on to talk about literacy difficulties in the UK, research has estimated that 1,900,000 people have dyslexia in the UK and 1,100,000 people have a reading age of 5 or less and 500,000 have AHAD. His talk about dyslexia and the web gave us some pointers on how to make web content more accessible. Web 2.0 is all about contributing, but if you have a problem writing, you might have difficulty having your say and be embarrassed about, for example, making spelling mistakes.

Barriers and common symptoms of dyslexia:
* Letter reversal - d for b
* Word reversal - tip for pit
* Inversions - m for w or n for u
* Transpositions - felt for left
* River of words – being driven to the spaces
* it can be a combination of things that make reading really difficult

Solutions: dyslexia and web / print for reading:
* non-white background
* colour gels
* easy to read fonts
* try not using words, for example images instead of words, podcasts, video, audio, a diagram or animations

On dyslexia and web personalisation
* look carefully at word spacing, line spacing, fonts, colours, backgrounds
* people can be self-conscious, especially if they share their computer or fear of people looking over their shoulder
* Most people don't know about customisation apps and tools such as stylesheets or how to use them
* The Textic was developed by a dyslexic developer to help people with dyslexia

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Phil Teare, of of Textic.com followed on from Jonathan, he describes himself as a hacker, a disability nut and dyslexic, he talked candidly about what it's like to live with dyslexia.

Phil’s on lots of forums and by his own admission often posts a hideous mess online and empathises with people are embarrassed about posting to forums when they may have spelling problems. He was diagnosed as dyslexic when he was 10 years old, he is uncomfortable with the fact that you have to pay to be assessed and told by an education expert that you’re dyslexic. He realised that he wanted to be a programmer that dealt with writing tools for disability and access issues and one of the first applications he wrote was a test for dyslexia and it works by testing for a variety of cognitive attributes that may tell you if you’re dyslexic. Educational psychologists spend a long time training to test for dyslexia, so it’s difficult to create a simple tool to test for this.

He went on to tell us that over 50% of people in prison are dyslexic in a nation where 10% of the population is dyslexic. This reflects on how difficult it is to get a job with dyslexia in a world that is becoming more and more text based. A lot of people know about assistive technology such as JAWS, but not many people know about technology for dyslexic people.

Dyslexia can be a severe impediment on your ability to read and write, for example, Phil's reading speed is about 1/6 of the average reading speed which makes filling in forms or reading books for work / education really hard. Spelling is hard too and makes life difficult, this is not down to laziness and often creates problems due to other peoples attitudes. It’s a difficult for people who aren’t dyslexic to empaphise with and put themselves in a similar mind set.

He is also very easily distracted by visual or audio noise which stops him from concentrating. There are a lot of unnecessary distractions on the web such as advertisements and widgets, for a lot of people these make sites unusable. He hates forms – long form filling is difficult, simple forms are better. When he became self employed and had to fill in his first tax form he got into a big mess with spelling mistakes, etc. The tax office sent it back and he was really annoyed. He created a online form for filling in his tax form but it kept timing and the only way he could do it was to get someone to help. This is when Phil finally decided that dyslexia was a disability.

He loves assisted environments, such as integrated development environments (IDEs) that have code completion (code prediction) which highlights and assists completing tasks. Dyslexia is all in the mind, it's entirely confined to the human brain, which only has to be slightly different to affect mental behavior. Phil also has a slow bandwidth between his eye and his brain so it means that he has a fuzzy image of the last word like a lo-fi webcam – think about how this makes you feel – this is also aural and tactile.

Is it legally a disability? As far as designing a website it is - as it should conform to certain standards and it’s incorporated into the disability legislation act.

What can you do to help dyslexics? Make everything simpler, but not simple, after all Einstein was dyslexic. Offer low-contrast web options as this makes things easier to read. Add spell checkers, font options and educate people - show people how to use the browser or technology and make it easier – people will not see all these tools though if links to them are hidden at the bottom of a webpage.

What can web 2.0 do? Phil’s building a web-based proxy called Masher Nations, written in Python – the idea is you make a web proxy that you can submit your own specifications to and then build a web community around it. It uses Yahoo's 'build your own web' service. It’s a proof of concept (you can find this at http://mashernationsdemo.appspot.com) and is free and open BSD. You can offer your own style sheets without having people have to figure out all the technicalities and is a way of adding functionality to most of the sites you use. It uses layers assistive technology on top of web pages, it's simple to use - you just type in your name and it configures to your requirements and is available on Google Code.

At the end of the day Christian Heilmann chaired a discussion panel with the audience, here are some quotes:
• 'Education is going to be the key to letting people know what they can do'
• 'People need to go out and talk to people about what’s out there'
• 'My web My Way is the tip of the iceberg as far as what’s out there'
• 'We need to develop tools as simple as the Wii as it works with symbols rather than words'
• 'We need to get behind the RNIB Toolbar'
• 'It’s easy to say shutdown unaccessible sites like Facebook, but we really need to talk to the geeks so we can fix it instead'
• 'Could the BBC swap their homepage for a day to a CSS naked day? '
• 'Why can’t we use ad space for informational video /ads instead – maybe something that people would actually like to look at?'
• 'If an accessibility app can be used for mainstream things like mobile then people may take more interest in it'
• 'Older people are telling us that young people are making things for themselves rather than older people'
• 'Nobody likes to think of themselves as disabled – so lots of people ignore content aimed at disabled people because they want to use what everybody is using'

What would the panel like to have tackled at the hack day?
Kath Moonan: Trying to make everything built in a simple way on one screen and uncluttered
Artur Ortega: New innovations for making things more accessible such as solutions reusing existing code
Jonathan Hassle: I want something that brings it all together. I’d like to see some modding – eg take a site that is presently not working for audiences we talked about today and then make them accessible and prove that they can be better.
Phil Teare: A means of collapsing a web page – most well structured web pages – and make them simple
Christian Heilmann: An easy way to distribute Grease Monkey for YouTube - it's a great tool, but far too geeky

After the introductions we saw a demo of Android, the Google open source mobile phone OS /platform. We were shown a couple of interfaces and a little app that the developer speaking had made of a mysterious blue bouncy ball (see Ian's previous post for a link to a video), it had an accellerometer and he could do an amusing impression of pong with it. It'll be interesting to see how this develops and competes against the iphone - I certainly hope it gets Apple to open things up a bit more.

There followed a day full of presentations on subjects such as the Web Toolkit, Chrome, OpenSocial and AJAX, as well as some really interesting, fun and quirky lightning talks put on by anyone who had a project to show.

* it's open source and anyone can use it for free
* Motivation & goals – writing a rich mobile application across a wide range of mobile devices is an impossibly difficult challenge today
* Why gears? Mobile web apps suck – they are slow, unresponsive, have high network latency – low bandwidth, slow CPU
* Fluid and location aware
* Fast persistent controlled storage
* Geolocation API
* Location based mobile apps
* Goal – easy free and secure
* Technology uses GPS, cell ID, IP, WIFI Location providers

There followed three demos of Gears mobile applications:

Google search with My Location, Andre Popescu

He gave us a demo of how Gears finds his location on a mobile; it used this location information to find local pizzerias in the local area to Wembley Stadium.

Marco of lastminute.com was next, they were interested in apps for spur of the moment choices. In research people said they expect devices to know where they are, so lastminute.com have looked into relationships with other operators to find location-based data apps. Apart from the cost problems are associated with this, these apps don’t work on roaming and also there are so many APIs you need to call up. Also you have to write lots of different code for all the different handsets. They’ve launched a mobile app with Windows on a HTC device.

It can take a while to get a GPS slot and you need to be outside, so it can be quite a long and painful experience. They’ve come to a compromise with the location data, so may not be so accurate for location but works. It works with a cell ID, it’s free and they hope that as time goes on it is available on more platforms.

Clive Cox CTO at Rummble

Rummble is:
* Social discovery site
* Social network and special user generated content
* Trust network analysis
* Individual subjective recommendations

ITN Offline News Ave Wrigley – Head of Technology at ITN ON

ITN ON is a company that produces multi-platform video products, in news, showbiz, lifestyle, and sports. They produce content for other people. on multiple platforms: m.itn.co.uk When you’re travelling you’re on and offline – there’s no constant connectivity. You can sit on a train and the offline user app will keep downloading stuff.

* They talked to Google about making a unique experience in offline browsing m.itn.uk + Google gears
* Offline edition for when you’re in ‘flaky mode’ – when you are getting patchy coverage – you can get the news even if you’re not connected.
* It uses geolocation for things like weather and news.
* The user sees configuration interface which shows them what sort of subjects they can browse – they can choose what they want to see.
* Graceful degradation
* Important that the device can detect whether you are in online or offline mode. Mode detection – simple code xttp request
* Dealing with video is very different from dealing with other content because it takes so long to download, so this app has download confirmation / stats as well as video format support. Only providing the right video format for the users handset. Simple approach to video and mime types –
* Querying the browser his tells you what video formats the phone supports.
* In the future could like to provide local news service using geolocation and geotagging

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From the lightning talks, I was very interested to hear about Glasgow Green Map a volunteer driven map for reuse facilities in Glasgow.

It takes the ecological data trapped in any community and frees it for people and communities to use. It lists reuse facilities and places like second-hand shops.

People from the local community have got involved because it was fun and a cool project. Having a meeting place for their regular Thursday meets means gives the group momentum and they're also motivated by each other. People who haven't got much technical experience get to work with professional developers and they learn skills in areas such as agile planning and coding.

You can find a link to their code is here: http://www.appletv.co.uk/greenmap/devteam.html

I'm looking forward to seeing how this technology evolves, as time and again speakers mentioned how virtual worlds are on the cusp of major development and in a similar emerging state as the web was in the early 90s. Here are my notes from some of the speakers - there was a huge amount to take in!

The conference had a theme of interoperability between virtual worlds.

Presently there are no standards for virtual worlds interaction, for example you can't take your Second Life avatar to visit a friend in say Twinity or in an MMOG such as WoW, although it must be said that you probably don't want to take your Second Life avatar into World of Warcraft as they'd be annihilated pretty quickly ;-) There's also a mix of open source and proprietary software which causes the usual problems and discussion about free apps vs. subscription apps/worlds, funding, etc.

*warning* - I got a bit carried away with my notes, consequently this is a very long post, so only hit the extended entry link if you're not rushing off anywhere!

SRIC BI currently have a remit to investigate virtual worlds – company is based in California with about 70 employees. Robert introduced his talk with a quote from William Gibson about virtual worlds – 'like a cross between being in some surburban shopping mall on the outskirts of Edmonton in the middle of winter and the worst day you ever spent in high school' - apparently this ties in with what most people think virtual worlds are like!

Beyond the Secret Club…
Robert talked about virtual worlds generally perceived as a ‘secret club’ to the rest of the world’s population and there needs to be more integration between the web and different generations. There’s a lot of activity around virtual worlds these days that suggests virtual worlds are gaining in popularity, but there needs to be improvements in the way virtual worlds are accessed - presently they’re difficult to use and not very user friendly – people are put off because they’re too technical. Virtual worlds uptake as an emerging technology is like the web in the early 90s: difficult to use, small pockets of people doing stuff but not really interacting with each other right now. Though the direction that virtual worlds are presently developing in means that they may be different to what we use now and develop in many different ways.

Business opportunities and key trends:
* Second life is the market leader and defacto standard at the moment
* Most are using second life
* Lots are using open source – OpenSim – Project Wonderland
* There are many platforms – but not direct equivalents
* There are patterns emerging – showing where each platform may go
* Open source platforms – open source software seems to be better at infrastructure and not such good interfaces.
* Open source is low cost and therefore more attractive, especially for the tech-savvy
* Most of the focus on web based work is concentrating on consumerism
* Progress towards standards is slow and demand for standardization is uncertain
* Connectivity with the web and other applications may matter more than connectivity between worlds

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Ren Reynolds – Crossing the policy boundary

Ren is founder of the Virtual Policy Network - a think tank was created as a reaction to a lot of issues coming up in virtual worlds. He said when mainstream media started taking notice, the politicians started taking notice, and so people started to worry about possible outcomes. The ‘policy makers’ have done some studies into virtual worlds, but it’s very difficult to engage the users of virtual worlds in the context of policy issues. There are government workshops coming up on virtual worlds policy all over the place, so it’s time to start to take things seriously!

Real vs. Virtual - we are already virtual in our everyday pursuits online, via email, Facebook, IM, Twitter and other online ways of portraying ourselves, our personalities and creating online social realities. We use bank accounts and make transactions – recreating what’s in the physical world. We have a concept of democracy online. Real issues in virtual worlds: what occurs in a virtual world is real and what matter is not its ontology but its impact:

Virtual Worlds mean many things to people:
* Fun
* Emotion
* Communication
* Learning

Virtual economies are big business in virtual worlds and gaming – World of Warcraft, EVE-Online and Second Life are examples. In term of gambling, Linden Lab took steps to ban it. With virtual economies comes the question of tax: WOW Gold, L$, PED - Swedish bank have said that VW economy is taxable!

What’s happening in terms of virtual policy outside the West? In China in the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s court they overturned The9’s decision to ban a ‘gold farmer’as the exploit was part of the code. In Vietnam, Thailand, there are time limits on MMO play and Australia does not rule out taxation of virtual worlds transactions

There are also indirect policy impacts in terms of IP, copyright and other controls, also voting and polls in new virtual public spaces. 

Gender, identity and identification is a big consideration. Personal representation: ‘breasts and scars’ – you don’t get flat chested women characters in virtual worlds and games, while men look all brawny and battle scared – at the ‘Women in Games’ conference last week, women said they wanted the opportunity to make themselves look more tough and fit, rather than big breasted and beautiful. There are huge policy impacts, especially where children are concerned and are seen to be at risk from identification – this is hard to control.

Sony SingStar karaoke game: you can upload your own videos – there are very little instances of videos been taken down? Self-law on behaviour – how is this changing the way we do stuff online? Kids are socially isolated due to the paranoia of kids not being safe on the streets – the wider context of this is that Virtual Worlds are becoming public space more frequently. There are loads of issues around identity and location.
 
Unintended consequences and summary questions:
* Policy makers like simple models
* What is a virtual world?
* Do laws for WOW work for Habbbo and OLIVE?
* What do we want?
* What do we fear?

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Peeling backs the interoperability onion – John Burwell, Vice President, Business Development Forterra Systems Inc

Talking about interoperability, what is needed and why should we really care?
* Building virtual worlds is a big job – providing the necessary functionality is an endless task and requires an eco-system
* Growth of the medium and the power of technophobia – you’re never going to get certain people to adopt technology – so you need to be able to fit in and stand out
* Lock-out – the dangers of single source solutions – when you’re implementing tech, you need t o integrate it with existing applications, platforms and hardware - what if you go out of business – can cost you more to get out than get in – you never know what’s going to happen!
* Investment protection and reuse
* Long term support – relates to lock-out – if you invest in a small company that goes under you are in trouble – interoperability addresses some of the issues
What’s been done to date?
* Growing awareness
* The Big Gathering and subsequent posturing – a lot of people thought they knew how things should work – an avatar with client side ability so you can take it round various virtual worlds. This might be unlikely as it needs to be written by commercial companies and virtual worlds are not developed enough for this to happen yet. Big Gathering is now defunct due to differences of opinion.
* Necessity is the mother of invention – mash-ups and native integration – delays in implementations
* Delay in pilots and implementations

Example decision to use OpenGL in Silicon Graphics – you have to create an architectural review board to take it from internal to external standard.

Beyond an Interoperable client
* Simple content
* Terrain
* Non-player characters
* Learning Management Systems and SCORM
* Avatars, logins & physiology modelling 

Content interoperability
* Use of industry standard modelling systems - 3DStudio Max, Maya, Sketchup
* Support for interchange formats eg Collada
* Scripting and animations
* Legal issues and intellectual property
 
Summary and conclusions
* Interoperability is critical for the growth of virtual worlds – it’s a hard problem to solve
* There are more to interoperability than a wire standards for clients 
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Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab - The Interoperable Second Life

‘A little interoperability goes a long way’ there’s been a lot of interest in web browser and web client access to virtual worlds. There’s been a lot of interoperability in Second Life for quite a while.
* You can do a lot with images – overlaying images and avatars to create virtual mash-ups – lighting information into images to get around using Second Life.
* Audio – uploading audio formats
* Animations – motion capture formats – can record performances such as ballet
* Streaming video – mixed reality conferencing, can link worlds in a meaningful way, allowing people to have serendipitous experiences.
* Streaming audio – described Suzanne Vega as the mother of streaming audio – being able to stream audio you get a lot of benefit, interoperability with standard formats
* Web – you can see the web working in SL and read screens such as Java coding screen. What you want in a VR is a web browser in a virtual world you can zoom in and see web content – easier to see web browser in virtual world than the other way round
 
At Mashed08, Jim created Carbon Goggles – a mash-up with Second Life and Amee, using Django Python and web services to track carbon emissions. He built objects in Second Life then associated them with online data to visualise carbon emissions – for example when you turn a kettle on you can see carbon coming out – it’s a serious augmented virtual reality application.
 
Economics: Second Life has its own economy - there’s a lot of stuff you can use to build your world – if you were having a conference you wouldn’t build a chair yourself – you’d go in and find someone who makes chairs and buy them with Linden dollars – ie you were creating an environment you don’t need to have your own designers to build things from scratch.
 
The Future? They’ve been working with IBM to talk about interoperability, such as the possibility of universities allowing them to teleport and exchange things such as avatars. OpenSim built by non-communists (poke at Forterra guy) these interoperated. It’s not for the feint hearted – you would only start developing this sort of interoperability if you knew what you were getting into. OpenSim and open source view means you don’t get stuck – because you always have the opportunity to download the source code to change the source code, not like the locked in model of cough Forterra. If you need to do some stuff like stereoscopic stuff that is now being developed in American universities – you can get the source code. There is no walled garden in SL – its always been interoperable – you’ve always been able to interact with other software. Interaoperability is about loads of stuff, economy, IP, kids, more than a view in a browser. It’s not a propreitry technology that won’t talk to other technologies.

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Twinity: when virtual Worlds become real – Norbert Meinike

Twinity is a virtual world which prides itself on real looking avatars and cities that mirror real life. They analysed two trends on the internet: the wish to interact with friends and for 3D entertainment. It’s a Virtual World that focuses on real life. It mashes up 3D worlds and social networking and they feel this gives Twinity the best of both worlds.

Key features of Twinity
* Real cities –it has virtual cities which mirror real life ones with precise mapping of buildings, etc. So far they have Berlin, but London is next and Singapore will follow.
* Real people – realistic looking avatars that you can create with photos, you can use your real name and there are various ways of communication. You can make your online flat look like your own home.
* Vibrant culture – you can party and hang out, go shopping, etc. They have built a realistic replica of the Cinestar Cubix in Berlin and also the Lumas Gallery
* Real economy – shops, property and currency – you Yan buy and sell virtual items, create a commercial shop etc. Drykorn is a real shop, that exists in berlin, you can try on dresses from real life collections too and get feedback from the sales staff!

Unfortunately for me, so far Twinity only runs on Windows XP and Vista - so I can't join in the fun on my Linux or Mac machines. It would be good to hear if they're going to rectify this any time soon as I'd really like to have a look around for myself!

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Case Study: How health insurer CIGNA uses a virtual world health community - Claus Nehmzow

Many employees have acute or latent healthcare issues - the 'old way' focussed on people already being ill – behavior is the largest single determinant of health status. A virtual world might help – a real time environment and a shared experience with anonymous vs. anonymous elements & simple vs. complex media.
 
Cigna /vielife health training seminars - video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBj0-mzrAY4

People arrive at an island in Second Life and are guided to where to go by greeters, people can sit and listen to the presenter and also chat on IM. The speaker uses 3D props and presentations. Giant props such as hamburgers illustrate a talk about fat consumption which includes real time voting. There follows nutritional information, illustrations show for example how much fibre you need to eat – people retain more information by showing props in this way. Animated slides show things like blood sugar level information. After the lecture they are offered interactive methods of exploring more information, eg games. These are used to reinforce the message. 

An interactive fridge contains various foods where you can click on food labels to find out nutritional information. Also a diner with an interactive menu and the user can ask questions. At the end the user gets a tab about how they use food and results from their choices – a reality check. There are also games such as Whack-a-food where you hit the food that is healthier. The experience reflects a serious business problem to educate and improve peoples eating behavior. It is a pilot at the moment, you can sign up directly or find via Second Life. Privacy isn’t a big deal right now, as they don’t collect personal data, but the age verification issue is interesting.

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Ronan Freeman – www.opensimulator.org

OpenSimulator is a BSD licenced, open source project. It’s is a virtual worlds server used for building 3D virtual environments written in C# and is cross platform. They have 24 employees, it’s platform independent, they love Second Life and have 8 full time developers working on large-scale events in virtual worlds.
 
Overview
*    Open source – anyone interested can contribute
*   Public domain – openSim licence is very short – basically says don’t sue us if it screws up your machine and credit us if you use it!
*   Global team – teams all over the world
*    Flexible design  - primary objective is to create an architecture that is modular
*    Established standards
*   Total control – you can integrate it with any applications that you want
*   Free!
 
Today
*   Grid or stand alone
*    Second Life compatible
*    Management tools
*    Application integration
*    Mesh import - integrating full mesh objects Skeleton structure – not constrained
*   Skeleton import
*    Low cost -free!
 
Tomorrow
*    Open viewer
*    Multi-grid rights management
*    Avatar management
*    Grid management
 
What’s the point of interoperability? Integration between virtual worlds would be good in an adhoc case by case base. What’s good about OpenSim is that you host it and you can make choices – ie you can give people a set of clothes to chose from so they’re not running around naked!
You can run it online or locally on your laptop – content creators find this useful because they create stuff offline. You can download it and either run it on a cheap connection or you can set it up on high spec server – eg Amazon Electric Cloud. 
Management tools will allow you to manage multiple grids and web services and can give robots complex tasks to do – such as integrations with Facebook, etc.

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Sun Microsystems Project Wonderland - Bernard Horan

When Sun Microsystems realized that only 50% of workers were in the office at any given time, they decided to do some research, this revealed an impact on motivation of their remote staff:

* with remote working you get a lack of social interaction, ie building up relationships, trust & loyalty and people get motivation from other people.
* there were management issues – it was difficult to establish what employees were doing
* difficulty brainstorming – apparently we only do this face to face

They concluded that current technology lacks social bandwidth. Sun started looking online at Second Life and World of Warcraft and how their communities and technology work together. Although it’s been a bit slow in the past, improvements in broadband, bandwidth and latency allow you to have a better shared experience.

A fascinating fact was revealed that in 2006 1 billion dollars were spent alone on acquiring objects in/for World of Warcraft.

The upshot of this was the Second Life MPK20 experiment – Sun built a campus in Second Life and exciting things started to happen, such as a guy who had his first serendipitous encounter with another person in 7 years of home working!

But there were a few drawbacks: in Second Life you can't use your own name, you have to chose from a list of preset names, so no-one knew who was who! In the end they got round this by having a wiki page so people could find out. It turned out that social experiences in Second Life were okay in their Sun campus, but they couldn't do any real work.

Wonderland is a virtual worlds toolkit and its goals are:
* to be emotionally salient
* have social presence
* encourage spontaneous, unplanned actions and socialising before and after events
* enhance communication between coworkers

Differentiators:
* live approach sharing
* integration with business servers
* internal external scalability
* 100% java
* opensource
* audio as core feature
* free
* extensive telephony integration

If you’re unfamiliar with Barcamp events, they run as an ‘unconference’ and it is hoped that everyone who attends will participate by giving a 30 minute session on something they’re into. Attendees add their sessions to an open schedule grid, usually reflected as half hour slots aligned across a number of small rooms or presentation areas. They usually run over two days with a sleepover incorporating games, hacking, socializing and lots of fun!

The questions that came up were interesting and varied, and asked our intrepid panel of Ian Forrester, Ant Miller and myself about subjects such as Radio Pop, BBC Blogs, should BBC staff members have their own blogs aggregated publicly for everyone to read, iplayer and copyright, and what BBC Backstage gets up to.

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Later that afternoon, my colleague Ant Miller, gave a talk on ‘BBC Micro for the 21st Century’ - he began with a slide that asked...

Question?
Should we do this again?
Should we WHAT again?
What did we do?

This year saw the 25th anniversary of the BBC Micro…
What is the BBC Micro? It wasn’t a BBC machine, it wasn’t for kids, and it wasn’t for schools…

Ant showed a clip from a Horizon programme from the 70s on the silicon chip and how computers of the future will affect everyone’s lives – ‘the micro-electronics revolution’ – he also showed a series of slides which bullet-pointed some of the back story to the BBC Micro. I wasn’t typing fast enough to get all the points on these, but I’m hoping that Ant will follow up with an expanded blog with all his slide notes.

Although the BBC Micro was quite expensive compared to the Spectrum and the Commodore 64, 1.5 million Micros were sold and also 400,000 books.

Ant then went on to talk about ARM (advanced risk machines) which sprang out of Acorn. There are billions of Arm chips – they’re in all sorts of things from mobile phones to handheld games consoles, Tom Toms and more. Ant showed us some examples of further education courses of students studying and playing with combinations of platforms and technologies.

How do we get people in the 21st Century to become interested in the fundamentals of computing and hardware rather than just accepting consumer goods and not being curious about how they work? Apparently applications for computer Science courses have gone down recently – how can we encourage the young of today to have the same fascination for computing and fiddling under the hood as we had when we were young?

What’s around for us to play with today? For example there's all sorts of fun and cool stuff to add to your Arduino, plus the differences between microprocessors and microcontrollers allows for all sorts of development. Also Rapid Prototyping is fun.

There followed a lively debate on how do we get people interested in coding, electronics and tinkering, and do we actually need to learn all this stuff now? The views of the room were interestingly divided. The OLPC was discussed as an example of the West perhaps patronising the Third World by saying they should use our computers – when they could probably do with other items first, such as shoes. The rights and wrongs of the West’s meddling reflect culturally interesting issues.

It was also mooted that the UK is becoming a services nation rather than building products for its consumers - if so is this a threat to anyone? Maybe the threat is about the possibility of being locked into other people’s (country’s, culture’s, company’s) systems – examples given included the iphone being locked down, planes having a switch that can blow it up to stop them being used as flying missiles in the case of hijack (really? *boggle*!). Also, how we can and should handle vast amounts of data if we don’t own, understand or have access to the systems that control it?

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I met some lovely people over the weekend, everyone was friendly and eager to listen to others. It's lovely to hear the stories of new Barcamp peeps who've pushed themselves to come along alone and had a whale of a time.

Daniel Burka – ‘Designing for Interaction’
Dan is an interface designer who currently works as lead designer for news website Digg.
He started off with a sporting metaphor - about baseball games attracting all sorts of people from different entry points, which incurs all sorts of personal interaction – he went on to discuss how a broad audience is one of the challenges facing site designers and went on to give us some of his thoughts…

Challenge #1
Get people socializing:
* How do you get people to be social and how do you encourage participation?
* Increasing benefits of your sites – going beyond altruistic motivations – supportive stuff – ie ‘if you do X you’ll get Y’
* Reduce barriers to entry – make things easy
* Dip your toe in the water – ‘get going quickly and get people going’

Challenge #2
Encourage positive participation
* Obvious way is personal profiles – encourage and trust connections
* Focus on tension points – copy and design can go a long way
* Avoid negative competition – ‘king of the hill’ fights don’t work

Challenge #3
Allow for flexible participation – allow for novices and people with niches interests – for both people with 5 or 5000 friends – a website that works for all users

Seek the ‘unobtainium’! Chemists use this term when they’re talking about ‘something’ they wish they had, or when they are lacking something special or crucial - interaction designers also often wish they had this when designing – that certain something that’s missing!

* Follow trails – don’t be afraid to adapt to your users ways of doing things

Summing up
* Increased benefit and lower barrier to entry
* Gives users a taste
* Expression = trust and connections
* Focus on tension points
* Adapt to volume and frequency
* Pave the cowpaths (pardon?!)

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Matt Jones & Matt Biddulph of Dopplr.com - ‘Designing the Coral Reef ‘

The Dopplr guys are sitting on a sofa waving at a monkey. They're looking very relaxed...

Dopplr is an online tool that brings together frequent travellers. It's very handy for people like me who travel a lot, as I can share trips and tips with my colleagues and friends.

After informal introductions, Matt Jones gave an overview of the ethos of Dopplr, and how they had been referred to as running like a ‘social physics engine’. Matt showed us some slides, one of them of some animal classification and Matt pointed to an area they’ve decided they’re most like which was something like ‘benthic macroforma (sp?)’ - I think he was joking!

Matt Biddulph then took over and talked about web 2.0 and Dopplr - in terms of connections and how you could compare their evolution to the early days of the computer, for example how large computers used to keep data in one place. Personal computers took people away from the mainframe, but sites like Flickr are now the mainframe for some of us.

The Matts (what's the correct plural?) went through a selection of quotes and examples from some of their friends who have done (or said) very clever or inspirational things, but I’m going to *poke* them about not including any smart quotes from their girl peers!

Anyways, Matt Biddulph sees Dopplr as ‘always on the edge of the map - on the loading screen’. They’re concerned with designing a distributed, interwoven identity and gave an example of a quote about an identity that appealed to them – it was by Martin Lindstrom who had said that when a coke bottle smashes into a 1000 pieces you still know it’s a coke bottle.

The identity of Dopplr came about when they were testing prototypes – ‘our brand slowly changes into your brand’. They like ‘delighters’ – this is a 'certain something' put into a persons experience to give him or her instant joy – such as a rubber duck – for example if you’ve had a miserable day and there’s a rubber duck left prominently in your hotel bathroom it will probably make you smile.

The colour logo strips on Dopplr change – people notice this over a period of using the site - why? They reflect what you’re doing and where you are in the world. Apparently the secret power behind Dopplr is a guy called Tom, who devises features such as this. He has done a lot of work on the colour frameworks they use on the site. They have public profile features, they refer to them as data toys – these are Dopplr’s ‘delighters’ – ‘Personal Velocity’ works out your average speed through the world in the past twelve months, and then compares it to the nearest speed in the animal kingdom - 'It’s a visualisation – we equivilized ™ speeds into animal representations’.

Matt B talked about building a distributed interwoven system. Looking at APIs from various sites and user experience across many variables such as platforms, he observed that there can be unforseen problems. Although the building process starts off simple and works fine, when you apply it to a live site it doesn’t always work out due unpredictables such as a bad connection or amount of traffic.

One of the things Dopplr is working on right now is the ability to check social network portability and making everything contextual – ie small pieces loosely joined. They’re adding lots of toys that they’d like to have a life outside Dopplr, for example an open social application that can interoperate with other applications and sites.

They recently launched at application that works with Twitter to add your trips.
Dopplr’s new features include ‘groups’ – to help you keep in touch with other people you’ve met, for example at conferences. It includes ‘coincidences’, also includes company groups such as the BBC.
There’s a ‘share this trip’ feature – you can chose people from your contacts or outside Dopplr and share info from a particular trip with them – they don’t want Dopplr to be a walled garden and this feature opens up the system.

There then followed ‘a science bit’ – Matt & Matt tried an experiment with QR codes (you had to be there to get this).

Matt Jones had a slide about the need for pause buttons on social networks. Dopplr mentioned they are careful not to talk about people’s contacts as ‘friends’ – but a connection of ‘trust’ relationships - as there’s so much weight, awkwardness and complication when you introduce the word ‘friend’ into everything. They like the Familiar Stranger project – it’s about the local people you see every day at the bus stop and around your environment – how together these people create a thriving and diverse city.

To end, a chuckling Matt Jones showed a Tim O’Reilly slide so ‘they didn’t get chucked out of the web 2.0 gang’ – which probably doesn’t come out as quite so funny in my write up. They’re also giving away some rather lovely booklets of stickers, reflecting countries in Dopplr’s favourite colours to beautify your laptop, notebook or forehead.

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Although I didn't get to see all the presentations, I heard lots of good feedback and snippets from colleagues. In the evening we dashed off to Audio for the after party which I had a hand in organising and Ian was our DJ and kept us jiggling with some fantastic mixing on his Pacemaker - lots of fun was had by all :-)

In this post I've pulled together my notes from the presentations from Margaret Robertson of Gamecity and lead economist on Eve, Eyjolfur Gudmundsson. There's an interview with Eyo online as well as Graham Brown Martin from handheldlearning. I'll be posting my impressions from the Dare to be Digital competition in part 2 as soon as I can as well as my notes from Graham's presentation.

Overall I really enjoyed the festival. There was tons to play with and some excellent talks on subjects that you maybe wouldn’t find at other games festivals. Here’s my take on it all...

Eyo is the lead economist for CCP Games’ research and statistics unit. He is employed to examine the economic markets and emergent social structures within Eve.

A few stats

• Eve is an MMO operating on one server, hosting 245,000 subscribers in the same world
• Players range from 17 – 70, biased towards males
• There is no grinding in Eve. The universe continues while players are offline and they can level up offline as the universe evolves around them.
• PvP architecture
• The game is a free download but players pay a monthly subscription.

Emergent Social Structures and Economic Systems in Eve

• Eve is a dynamic universe. Factions are player created and destroyed. The interaction both within and between factions is dictated by the players, not the developers. The developers provide the game architecture but let the players create the universe. "Are developers janitors or Gods?"
• Emergence happens due to the increasingly complex social interactions generated by an increase in community size. More players leads to more self organisation.
• Larger social networks create their own rules and start to operate with their own purpose.
• "The number of possible 1-1 relationships in a network grows like the square of the population." I've tried to work this out and it makes my head hurt.
• Unleashing the power of players – The Titans in Eve are probably the biggest in-game objects ever built in an MMO. The first was built by one of the largest confederation of factions ever seen in the game and took 4000 players 8 months to build or, looked at another way, about 1,700 man-years.

Time line of emergence of social structures and services in Eve

Note - It was very interesting to see the reactions of Eve players in the audience to this graph. This information is not something that the players would normally be privy to.

Governance of Large Communities

• The emergent social structures within Eve have come about due to the way the game is hosted – a single shard, large size population.
• Eve has complex social structures and communication systems. Each faction democratically elects a head who represents them at meetings with the game’s designers, CCP. This is not a game, this is a social experiment!
• This democratically elected "Council of Stellar Management” are flown to CCP’s home country Iceland to meet and deliberate on issues that effect the game world. Voting within the factions can dictate the council meeting agendas.
• The council is currently made up of 2 women and 7 men. The youngest council member is 17, the oldest is 52. This is fairly representative of the game community.
• Council meetings take place out of game, in the metagame. The discussions tend not to be about political wrangling between factions but rather how to achieve peace and stability in the universe. Players want a game-world which works so that they have a stable platform to do with as they wish.

Economy

• Eve's player driven economy became possible around the 100,000 mark, before that it had to be supported by the developers.
• Markets in Eve are actually closer to a perfect lazes faire market economy than in real life due the relative transparency of information.
• The value that players assign to commodities is the driving force for prices in Eve’s markets. Weapon and mineral prices respond to effectiveness and perceived value.
• Supply and demand works in Eve. Price wars can be triggered by impending releases. Changes in the beta game can result in certain commodities being bought up in the full game as players perceive an impending shortfall.

Margaret Robertson - The Ten Most Important Games of the last year you’ve never heard of (sort of)

As always, the games Margaret showcased veered wildly from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. Her talk highlighted how much games are diversifying and integrating into people’s daily lives.

The Hardcore & casual gamer collides:

• There was a proviso used throughout the presentations at EIF that basically went along the lines of, “I don’t believe that there is distinction between the hardcore and casual gamer anymore but if there were then this is what I’d have to say about it.” This was Margaret’s take on it all:

Increased drive from developers and publishers to appeal across demographics

• Battlefield Heroes (EA DICE) - An established FPS IP given a new, more accessible art style.
• 3rd person perspective rather than the original’s more “hardcore” FPS approach.
• More humour and more flamboyant action.
• Lots of character customisation.
• Basic gameplay not as difficult.
• Pretends it’s a browser game even though it’s a downloadable file. Players have to go online to play so it feels less committed.
• Ad supported front end means it’s free to play.

The rise of User Generated Content in games

• UGC in games is becoming more and more prevalent, either by way of contributing to existing IP or creating entirely new games.
• New IP - Fruit Mystery (Brett Graham) – Utterly ridiculous and hysterical UGC game with dreadful graphics, sound and grammar. Totally compelling as it doesn’t attempt to be anything other than a dumb diversion.
• The Sims Carnival (EA MAXIS) - Provides players with the tools needed to create games.
• Newtoon (Soad/Futurelab), java based game creator for mobile and web. This stuff is mainly just curios but it does signify a change in expectations. Gamers now expect UGC content.
• The result of all this UGC is the overwhelming impression that making a good game is really rather difficult. Anyone can make a game but making a good game still requires talent. There is some seriously pro UGC stuff out there like Desktop Tower Defence (Paul Preece) & 2Across (Eliza Block), a UGC iphone app.
• Perhaps in response to this glut of UGC old school game designers such as Peter Molyneux are now starting to come back into the industry to provide quality products like Fable or Spore. – DeathSpank: Orphans of Justice (Ron Gilbert/Hothead) is such a game and also highlights a move towards the episodic release of games.
• Creative collaboration – While already prevalent on PC there is a growing trend for high quality console games to deliver the option for UGC. Little Big Planet (Media Molecule) allows gamers to personalise their avatar to an incredible degree, design their own levels and submit those levels to the gaming community. Halo 3’s Forge and Theatre options allow players to edit levels in a real-time multiplayer context. Game design and the creative process has become a much more important part of the game experience.
• The amount of money people are making designing games is going to lead to more independent game designers. Why should someone with a good idea have it swallowed up by a company when they can now realistically go it alone?

Who makes games?

• Quizmania represents the convergence of platforms and content. It is an interactive late night quiz game from a company which doesn’t normally make games. Originally a TV product but now web based. Quizmania only runs at certain times (9pm – midnight) to appeal to a certain demographic. It supports live chat with both the presenter and the other players. The quiz mechanic encourages interaction and players can choose whether they want to bet real money or not.
• Chain Factor (AREACODE) - An ARG for CBS series, Numbers. Chain Factor is featured in an episode of Numbers where a serial killer is murdering people based on their scores in the game. But the game is real because you can play it. But it’s fictional because it’s in a TV programme. Oh dear, I’ve gone cross-eyed.
• Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People – Another episodic game available on PC and WiiWare. the game comes from established online comic IP, Homestar Runner.
• Song Summoner (Square Enix) ipod game. Statistic based RPG that uses your ipod’s music library. Every character is based on a piece of music in your library and there are bonuses for listening to the tune that relates to them. Can completely change listening behaviour as players try to “level up” songs they might not normally listen to.
• When you start using a game like this with something like the Nike+ achievements then you end up with people creating their own agendas for games. What do I want to do today? Level up this character? Achieve a certain BPM? Set challenges for my friends? This MAKES you run for a reason other than simply keeping fit – it can achieve other purposes.
• Phase (Harmonix of Rez and Rock Band fame) is another ipod game that lets you play through any of your tunes as a game. Harmonix have a rich history of music based games and are now starting to implement player’s own musical tastes into their products.
• "The one thing I know about ARGs is that they’re dead." With videogame designers and other businesses traditionally thought of as outside gaming starting to merge realities and introduce playful mechanics where does that leave ARG designers? With powerful open source design and publishing tools you can now go from ARG preproduction through publishing and onto the blog in 12 hours flat.

Flash reaches loads of people.

• Flash is a good test-bed for demographics and is easy to monetise. On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness (Hothead Games) is an XBLA game that shows the rise of affordable engines and platforms to facilitate smaller games developers.

Grown Up Games - Games as a mind expanding experience

• Games should have meat on their bones. Braid (Jonathan Blow) is an XBLA game that treats time as precious. It uses that time to improve people and their lives.
• Gravitation (Jason Rohrer) is, according to it’s creator, “a video game about mania, melancholia, and the creative process”
• But it extends beyond smaller games. The narrative in Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft) changes people’s perceptions. Margaret recommended Patrick Redding’s own presentation for GDC 08. I haven’t had chance to read it yet but apparently I should. And so should you. Check out more at Margaret’s blog at lookspring.

Much of what I heard was about innovation and what is changing in the games/interactive industry and communities – such as new ideas & audiences that are turning traditional attitudes on their heads – I certainly came back suffering from information overload, but in a good way! It was a very busy conference, but I managed to grab a few video interviews with some of the attendees.

The festival also encompassed the Dare to be Digital video games competition for student games designers and developers, where I saw some interesting and varied demos from the University of Abertay Dundee. Teams had 10 weeks to develop a game prototype. There are three winners and each wins a cash prize and a BAFTA nomination for the BAFTA ‘Ones to Watch’ award which will be announced in March next year.

My colleague Brendan will be following up this post with some of his highlights from EIF08. Anyway, to be getting on with, below are notes from a few of the presentations…

New trends for the expansion of immersive gaming experience:
* 6-10 age games, family and grey gamer sectors grow
* High definition enabled homes spawn combi console / STBs
* Ubiquitous wifi powers ‘anywhere’ gaming
* New game engines, physics, lightning and lip-sync tools
* Voice recognition, GPS and ‘location aware’ servers
* Massive worlds, cinema-real ‘thinking and speaking’ characters

New trends drive new gaming business innovation:
* Behavior tracking will enable ‘pinpoint’ marketing
* Micro-payments and cash online transaction modes
* Advertising subsidises consumer spending
* Gambling becomes a source of development funding
* User enhanced, user generated and user published games
* Games for special niche communities

Opportunities in new experiences where gaming culture will be relevant:
* GPS on mobiles and ‘location aware’ servers
* Ubiquitous screens and high definition redefine TV
* Females become the biggest paying audience on the web
* ‘Concierge’ services as time becomes a precious commodity
* Monestisation of streaming unleashed the ‘long tail of live’
* Revolution in user interfaces and input including voice
* Mobile phone communities go massive and global

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Too Cool for School - A New Look at Games in Educations - Derek Robinson - http://hotmilkydrink.typepad.com

Derek gave a fascinating talk about how Learning & Teaching Scotland are looking at different approaches to games and learning. He has set up the Consolarium, a centre for games based learning.

Traditionally, games have been frowned upon in schools, but in Scotland they’ve seen some remarkable results by allowing kids to play off the shelf games such as Nintendogs, Guitar Hero, Brain Training and Endless Ocean. They found that these games helped flatten out the divide between different skill streams in the classroom. It was found that with maths games, for example with Brain Training and Nintendogs, kids learnt quicker, became faster at solving problems and overall had more confidence and engaged more freely with other members of the class.

Playing these games has inspired the kids in Scotland no end, they’ve set up blogs to talk about their experiences, such as how their pet dogs in Nintendogs are getting on and accessories for them. Derek emphasised how off the shelf games should not be dismissed and to be careful of thinking that ‘worthy’ educational games are the right or only choice for education.

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Professor Austin Tate (University of Edinburgh) - Innovative Education using Virtual Worlds

Austin is Director of AIAI (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Virtual worlds technologies are getting really interesting, as they’re increasingly specialist, especially where applied to learning and simulation worlds from art galleries, to military and healthcare. The following notes are a bit lean, but I hope the links help you find out more…

Timeline for virtual worlds
* 1978 onwards - multi-user dungeon & domain via early chat / IM
* 1990 onwards - MOO - MUD object orientated
* 1990 onwards - MMORPG
* Now - multi-user virtual environments and virtual worlds (MUVE/VW)
* Next - external content management and links to web services

The Virtual University of Edinburgh VUE, has a campus in Second Life. It’s looking at new methods of teaching and new ways to study - a bit more fun and more effective ways of doing things. The VUE virtual campus has a building reminiscent of the college buildings and also features local Edinburgh buildings. It has art installations - they have a gallery open in Second Life that will also open soon in real life.

iRoom: a room for intelligent interaction related to virtual collaboration work. For example there’s a Paternoster tasting room - people have their own whisky tasting kits at home, but join in an educational and social experience online.

Other virtual worlds include Kaneva, Lively and Wonderland.

There are some professionally licensed and private virtual worlds such as ProtoSphere - which is aimed at companies as well as educational establishments: http://www.protonmedia.com

Forterra Olive is also licensed and quite expensive as it comes with lots of applications and specialist worlds in areas such as refugee, medical and military: http://www.forterrainc.com/

Twinity allows closed walls and systems. It allows the user to let selected people into their areas: http://twinity.com/en

Anyway, there’s tons of virtual worlds - but they’ll almost certainly thin out as some survive and some don’t. Privately managed regions and controlled areas are becoming popular, especially for simulation for medical, government and military. It’s all extremely interesting :-)

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Gianna Cassidy from the Psychology of Music Research Group, talked about the relationship between music and games, here’s some notes from her slides:

Videogame play presents a valuable yet relatively untapped platform for musical experience:
* Exposure to symphonic scores eg Halo
* Increasing customisability of soundtracks eg GTA series
* Boom in music performance and creation games eg Rock Band

How music plays a fundamental role in videogame experience
* Forms a channel of communication, interaction and direction
* Enriches the game world - aiding the creation of context, setting the scene and semantic inference about protagonists
* Assist the player in navigation of the play space - directing the player through the sequence of game play and providing functional reference and feedback
* Developed from underscoring the characters actions and functional feedback from the environment to enriching, maintaining and manipulating the emotional context of the game world - aiming to create a seamless impression of gameplay.
* Music acts as an emotional glue between the player and the game - symbiotic communication of induced and expressed cultural, emotional and social content.

She went on to tell us about some research into gamers response to certain types of music in games - how it affects the rate of player activity, player physiology and emotional state - they used Wii Sports, Wii Star Wars and WiiFit games. As you might imagine self selected tracks had the highest arousal results.

Summary
* Music is a powerful tool to elucidate social emotional and cognitive processed and outcomes of our gameplay experience - an emotional glue and channel of information between the game and player.
* Music is a tool to regulate our social, cognitive and emotional interaction with games - it has both positive effects on accuracy, efficiency, judgment, attention, motivation, enjoyment, mood state, liking and evaluation of the game - mediated by preference, perceived control, contextual specificity and liking.

For information on the feeds available, please visit the /programmes site developers page.

For more information it is worth reading Tom Scott's "Interesting BBC Data to Hack With" post and Duncan Robertson's in-depth post about the iCal views.

For people who have already found the Schedule feeds, it is worth noting that the structure of the existing schedules feeds will change soon (by the end of July if all goes to plan). This move is to a future-proofed and better structure, based on the feedback received. There is a hybrid format available to allow you to transition your apps to the new format - we will remove support for the old structure on 30th July.

Feedback is welcomed through the backstage mailing list.

Steve

It’s really great that user-led innovation is being taken seriously these days and I was really pleased
when I got an invite to NESTA to hear some presentations and discussion on the subject. This is an area that I’ll be following closely as it’ll be interesting to see how policy develops around this stuff, especially in IP and copyright.

There are some companies/industries who have been on the ball for a couple of years, who embrace and engage with their user communities and of course there are still a few stalwarts who feel this kind of innovation is their enemy and must be stamped out at all costs - but they’ll just have to adapt or die.

NESTA commissioned a piece of research from CENTRIM (Centre for Research in Innovation Management) University of Brighton investigating the power of user-led innovation. They held a morning of talks and discussion about their findings at Plough Place and also invited some representatives of companies and online communities to talk about their experiences.

Anyway, first up was Steve Flowers of CENTRIM, University of Brighton, he talked about the CENTRIM research into user-led innovation.

Project overview:
to look into policy and community, they examined areas such as:
• video/film/mashups
• games
• social networks
• music

What do we know about user-led innovation (example relationships)?
• user + manufacturer
• user = manufacturer
• users vs manufacturer – conflict – music industry
• online communities are very important – they've changed the rules of innovation in a fundamental way

The user-led innovation ecosystem includes:
• feedback & support
• content creation
• new uses
• unexpected developments in technology
• minor mods
• major mods – subculture of modding, fundamental changes to architecture of systems
• new products

How are companies embracing user lead innovations?
• commercialising user ideas
• building products around user content
• toolkits, components & architecture
• recruiting innovative users
• engaging with user communities

Who is doing it? (examples noted from a slide of logos below - wheeee it includes backstage, how interesting!)
• Sony
• Lego
• bebo
• Ecademy
• EMI
• Facebook
• Microsoft
• Sibelius
• fxpansion
• Swapitshop
• backstage
• Linden Lab
• Relentless Software
• Splash Damage

What are the policy issues?
• the rules of innovation have changed
• but we have a linear model hangover
− user-led innovation remains hidden
− policy indifference or hostility
− regulation can act against user led innovation

For example some companies have had to change their policy as modding was illegal to begin with.

How should government support user led innovation?
• re-frame regulation to promote user led innovation – copyright rethink
• establish a user innovation forum
• 'extend' R&D tax credits

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Justin Baron - Sibelius

This company makes musical notation software and was started by Ben & Jonathan Finn in 1993. They now have over 100 employees. Users range from composers to schools, the software is used all over the world and there are several different language versions.

Sibelius uses manuscript plug-in technology. There over 300 plug-ins and over 90% are created by people external to the company, they range from the cute to quite complex. They have a very active online community and users who create software retain the IP.

‘our community come up with exciting and unexpected ideas’ – Justin Baron

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Jonathan Attwood – Swapitshop

‘We reward kids for doing stuff!’

Swapitshop is basically a kids & teens community - 45% girls 55% boys. Swapitshop membership gives kids a ‘bank account’ with them and some starter credits. You gain more credits in return for certain tasks such as buying and selling or doing things. You can trade them, for example you can trade a CD for credits. Brands also sponsor tasks, they pay kids for ideas and product placement.

There are some smart kids who are already Swapitshop credit millionaires. Some of them have done it by importing, bartering & reselling.

Kids are also starting up fan sites & youtube ads to promote what they’re doing on Swapitshop.

Swapitshop are now paying kids for their advice. For example they took some kids to a supermarket for some marketing insight and the kids made the manager get on the floor and go round on his knees to get the kids perspective.

An example of something they’re presently doing is ‘Ad builder’ – getting communities to create their own banner ads.

Also, Virtual business partner – it allows kids to set up their own shops & also to sell their expertise to businesses

In schools they’re using gold stars to exchange for Swapitshop credits for participating in tasks like healthy eating and going to finance advice lessons.

Swapitshop makes money as a business by charging the companies who use the data/information that kids generate.

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Pete Lemon- GBA gaming community

Pete is one of the founders of a community-led site for Gameboy, DS and other handhelds.
It has over 10,000 forum members and over 500 active developers, musicians and designers in the community who create all sorts of things such as games, graphics, sound tools and emulators for handheld devices. It started off with mostly a mostly male audience, but more females are joining.

The site/community allows much creativity & collaboration between designers, coders and musicians and a lack of commerciality breeds lots of very interesting products which would not have come out of commercial sector.

They have competitions – one ended up with a cartridge of 10 games being created for Gameboy 1500 copies were made and they sold out within 2 days.

The GBA community has helped users get jobs, use data on the site for their degrees and the major companies have used site for ideas and to spread information

There are no IP issues – Nintendo are happy for them to be there because they promote their products and help people into the industry.

Their sponsors range from gaming sites to hardware sellers.

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Discussion between panel and audience – in the main the audience made comments:

* Difficult to put a price / monetary value on some user-led companies – will be interesting in the future to see how these develop and the legal that comes out of this.

* Is there still a gender bias with user-led innovation? Does the ‘glass ceiling’ for women still exist? (I did note that the panel and the chair were all men - would have been good to have a woman on the panel ;-))

* One member of the audience said that it would be interesting to see how government legislation and attitudes would develop if we stopped calling it 'user innovation' and started calling it 'people innovation'.

* NESTA are going to try to create spaces for users/services/front line services in the public sector.

* A product designer commented that she was worried that people were doing a lot of the stuff that she gets paid for, for free – should she retrain?!

* Central St Martins product design lecturer worked on an AHRC project with a cycling community to work on and look at why bikes were being stolen and how they could re design products to help the community.

* The internet has changed how people meet like-minded people – this has changed the dynamic and acceleration of how people meet.

* Pervasiveness around ICT has impacted on our lives.

* People create stuff for free because its fun, people enjoy it and lots of people look at it.

* How do you create sustainable business models – free sharing communities / with areas who wants to make money clash? How do we turn hobbyists into companies?

* Fail to take notice of online communities at your peril! An example was given of a company that allegedly wasn’t watching its users’ community forums and apparently missed a problem with their product and then lost money and credibility.