Travels in the UK+ Scotland

It was fantastic!

The yellow dots indicate where we slept at least one night.

a summary:
*Kath's performance at our opening
*Yorkshire Sculpture Park
*Enjoying the Burnlaw Bahai community spirit
*Getting feedback from Sarah in Edinburgh on my paper
*Spending time with Tim + Vanessa and their daughter
*The Stirling Folkclub night
*An overdose of Scottish castles, cathedrals + mansions.
*Paddy + Catherine's farm+forest
*Finding Pict stones
*The sea at Lossiemouth
*Findhorn community
*Painting a house on skye
*Folkclub in Biggar, but the elderly centre the following morning was more fun!
*Final dose of Scottish ruins before we returned to Roger + Marion at Burnlaw
*Taking down the exhibition in London
*St. Albans Cathedral + Roman ruins
*The Shuttleworth airplane collection in Bedford
*Dinner party in our van + performances in a Bethnall Green gallery (London)
*Winchester on our only day in the UK it did not rain.
*Camping in a paddock near Beer, Devon
*Chilling out in Somerset
*Cookham town
*Toroa returns for work via Luton airport
*Visiting NZ Bahais in Romsford
*Sonja returns for a meeting via Stansted airport
*Punting in Cambridge
*Ely Cathedral
*Norwich + some lakes (Hickling) on the coast

exhibition in London :: 18 July - 2 August

Kath Tait will be performing her songs at 8.30 on July 17th

All are welcome

address is here: Willesden Green Centre



We will be back on the evening of the 2nd of August to take the work down, if you wish to meet us.

And we are doing a performance in East London on 7th August
at Wiebke Morgan

Exhbition in Leiden shops closes :: Olivier raps

Julian and others talk about Augmented Realtiy + their projects

Augmented Reality workshop at Mediamatic in Amsterdam

I participated in the: Augmented Reality Games: Rapid game design workshop hosted by Mediamatic and given by Jonas Hielscher (Cologne), Julian Oliver (NZ/Spain) + Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (NL).

After some lessons in the opensource 3D modelling programme Blender and Julian's demo of Levelhead, we were introduced to the open source C and C++ language software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications: ARToolkit.
The ARToolKit was originally developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato, and its ongoing development is being supported by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa /New Zealand, and ARToolworks, Inc, Seattle. More info: artoolkit.sourceforge.net

<< Julian demonstrating his AR game, Levelhead. You hold it in front of a webcam and when it reads the markers on the sides of the cube, an image of a room and a animation of a white silhouette of a male figure appears. You navigate the figure in the rooms by moving the cube at different angles until it reaches different levels.


<< Jonas + Julian show the how the simple type of marker works with an earlier version of ARToolkit than Julian used for Levelhead.

The ARToolkit Pro doesn't work on Apple computers which were supplied by Mediamatic. However I ended up - largely due to Julian doing 99% of the work, developing our game idea on my 2 week old Linux system on my laptop.

<< Floris Schreuder (on the right) my partner for our AR game (left) Follow the Rainbow
The workshop also involved working in groups to develop a game, that hopefully utilized AR. The 9 of us worked on 3 games and there were two c ++ programmers in the group. I was absolutely delighted that in our group of two, I ended up being the "pretend" programmer for our game. I say "pretend" because Julian did the programming and all I did was play with variables.

The goal of the game was to find the pattern (the rainbow sequence in order to change into an "angel", "superhuman" or "alien". So in wearing the marker (a feather) a 3D blender-made head would appear (here Floris used the default monkey head with some textures and for this prototype we just had one head) and this would change randomly when you moved into another space (such as taking a step).
<< Jelle van der Ster is the individual behind the mask

While the square of colour (over your soul/heart) changed meaningfully and was the real clue to follow. So part of our idea was the illusion or trickery (also fun) of following sensation or the face or what is most visually impressive rather than the more subtle indications of one's heart/soul. The head was not supposed to change colour, but, all this was programmed by Julian in between helping all of our groups, so it definately was a rush job.
<< Hein Eberson is the individual behind the mask


I was really pleased that Julian was patient with my questions and that I was able to follow most of what he did. Of course doing it myself is quite another story, but I'm inspired to pick this up again once pressing deadlines in my life are out of the way and then to see how far I can develop this game idea into something interesting and who knows, engaging :)

ETC conference in Amsterdam + some Leiden uni courses

I was at the Eclectic Tech Carnival for 3 days in Amsterdam last week, which is a gathering of women to learn technical or computer related stuff from each other. I gave a workshop on making websites and in a few weeks will add some images and thoughts on this event.
I met some fantastic women!

It was also lovely to catch up with Claire and we cycled at 2.30 a.m. across a very quite Amsterdam to a Bahai event and then back again at 4.30 to the sound of birdsong and a lightening sky.

Blast with my sister + sights in Leiden, Delft + Amsterdam

no time to write about May 10 + 11 yet, but i will soon!