(Photo courtesy of NYU Stern)

What this means is not just a nice chunk of change to kick-start our business, but also a virtual pod and access to the Berkley Center’s network of faculty and professional experts. We’re of course thrilled, and can’t wait to get to work on our first games (as soon as we finish our theses, of course).

(Photo by Anaid Gomez Ortigoza)

We owe a million thanks to everyone at ITP who’s helped us along the course of the past year with this, especially Red Burns for giving us the opportunity to try out a wacko idea like this and see it throuh, Tom Igoe, Clay Shirky and Amit Pitaru in whose classes we developed the original prototypes, Marianne Petit and Nancy Hechinger for their amazing guidance and support, everyone who came to watch and cheer us on before and after, and the zillions of fellow students who convinced us we could actually do this.

So — much more to come!

It’s a sweet piece, and it was mega-nice of all the BB folks to post it. The comments are actually shockingly intelligent too — seems like people kinda get what we’re going for, and that RULES.

Edit: And now Kotaku!!

Hey! It’s us! And the live-action Socialbomb game at the ETech ArtFest!

Read way more on the Geek Entertainment TV post.

With this in mind, I want to make a wearable that emulates (in both look and function) an iChat/AIM/Gtalk/whatever icon.  It would have a very simple user interface: are you busy or available?  If it’s the former, your icon turns red and people will know not to talk to you.  If it’s the latter, your icon is green and you will be welcoming conversation.

Idle may be a bit different here than usual, but I think there’s a way to solve it: put a small mic in the unit.  When you’ve been available for a while but not talking to people, you’ll be viewed as “idle” and your icon will turn yellow-orange (as it does in most chat programs as well).  I’m still figuring out if, for both circuit complexity and logistics, it makes makes more sense to have an accelerometer to detect when you’re moving, but then again you don’t always move a lot when you’re having a conversation.  Have to do a bit more research before I get that ironed out.

The deeper issue is the same as the one that affects online chat ettiquite — some people say they’re away when they’re not, and others say they’re available when they don’t actually want to talk.  As of yet, I don’t have the best solution for that, but I think studying actual chatters may fix that up a bit.  It either involves a more complicated set of options for the user (and we all know that unnecessary complications are a very bad idea)

The next stage for these might be to include (you were waiting for this, weren’t you?) an XBee radio so that units can talk back and forth, letting users set a “busy but not really” status that shows them as red, but your unit would turn them green.  It would also help to solve the back-from-idle issue.  Maybe.  It’s something to consider, anyway.

(This is so, so not helping my thesis, is it?)

Yesterday I caught a pile of great talks, starting with Stamen Design’s data visualization session, moving on to Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk tutorial, and ending with Tim O’Reilly’s Radar.

We Socialbombers were also able to sneak into Tom’s talk by serving as helpers while people were wiring up their boards and learning how to use Arduino with Processing.  It’s fun to watch people take a three-hour crash course on a semester and a half of ITP — and they did really well with it!  Lots of new happy Arduino owners now.

(Photo stolen from Scott)

And we ducked out for a while to work on our SB units, and fired them all up for the first time together.  They’re much smaller, lighter, and cooler than our first units, defintiely, and they hang quite well from the conference lanyards!

(Photo stolen from Scott)

There’s still some issues to work out (a few cranky boards, battery concerns, the crosstalk at startup), but it’s such a huge flying leap from the work we did on this a year ago.

Back at it now, watching Paul Torrens‘ talk on crowd modeling.

ETech kicked off this morning, with nerdy tshirts appearing all over the faaaaancy hotel’s floor and Apple logos appearing at random.  The check-in process (which we did last night to avoid the rush and/or sleep later) was painless, and now we have neat-o speaker badges:

The talks look great thus far and I’m stoked to meet people who actually do this sort of thing for a living.

Looks like we’re all set to run our Bof (Birds of a Feather session) tomorrow too:

Stamen Design presenting data visualization techniques:

…and I should probably start paying attention again.  More soon.

I’ll be presenting Socialbomb with Adam and Scott at the ETech ArtsFair, running a full game on the show floor and babbling endlessly about delocalized gaming and proximity-focused sensors, and… oh, sorry, I tend to rant. In short, it should be a blast. Going to be at ETech? Come find us and play a game!

And while I’ll post a lot more about this once we’ve finalized the process, the latest prototypes for the Socialbomb pieces look great. Take a look!

What do you do at ITP when you don’t like computers? Why, you write on windows, of course!

(Kidding, it was something she, Ruth, Greg (and possibly others, I don’t know) were doing for the Site Specific class.)

Small picture sampling:

Full set, as always, up on Flickr.

I could go on about the conference for days, but in short it was a fantastic day, I learned a ton, and I spent way too long out throwing back a few with the attendees. ITP was strong in numbers, of course, with some fantastic presentations from Jury and Dan (Megaphone), Josh and Charles (Casablanca), Dennis Crowley (area/code), Mike Sharon (Socialight) and a few others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Oh, and Andy Maskin sticking a phone in a block of ice.

Oh, I ended up in an improv business plan thingy with Josh, Adam, Lisa and a few others, where we were tasked to make a business and a product from a bunch of crowd-generated (and therefore hilarious) terms. Given that the terms included words like kamikaze, kitten, kangaroo, ex-girlfriend and bubbles, it was a nutter free-for-all in terms of what ended up. Our group, being mostly ITP and entirely insane, offered a system for remotely harassing cats, calling ourselves Nuclear Kitten. See?

Oh, and one of the best parts? I walked away with a freaking AWESOME Nokia 95 for our efforts. I’m digging it highly so far, barring the fact that my Verizon contract doesn’t expire for a few months and this thing’s GSM only.

…with a bit of a nod to Mouna, RSG and yours truly, amongst others. I’m highly flattered, and a bit confused, but really glad the festival’s getting the attention it deserves. It was an amazing time — by far the best festival I’ve been involved in, and likely the best I’ve even been to in recent memory. A full write-up is due, but in the meantime:

[read]