adoption curve dot net

My first job of the day on most days is dog-walking. Our preferred route runs behind a golf course along the edge of a cliff which overlooks the Rivelin valley. The cliff side is practically vertical, and once you’re off the very narrow path that threads along the top, it’s completely overgrown with bracken and brambles and trees.   So once the dog veers off the path and into the undergrowth, she’s completely invisible.

Fortunately, she’s pretty well-trained and will come straight back when she’s called, so it’s no problem – in fact it’s a net positive because of the energy she burns off haring around through the bracken. But it’s quite useful to know roughly how close she is, if only so I can moderate how loud I have to shout if I need to call her back for any reason.

I’m also intrigued by just how far off she wanders as I walk along, and by implication how much further she walks/runs than I do. So I got thinking about some kind of device that would provide an indication of how far off the dog (or any other moving thing, for that matter) was from me.

What I’m thinking of is something that provides a degree of ambient awareness – I don’t want something that flashes or bleeps because that would be overly intrusive. One of the useful side effects of *having* to walk the dog is that it’s an hour’s peace and quiet to think about things, and a machine going “bing!” would spoil that. And I’m really not sure I want to sound like a submarine while trundling along.

So what I’m thinking of is something that could strap to the wrist like a watch, and provide a gentle pressure which varies with the distance of said animal from me. It could be a tightening band, like a watch strap – or something that pressed with varying force.  Perhaps some kind of eccentric cam that rotates to tighten or apply the pressure. The force would be proportional to the distance of the dog – a very light touch when she’s within view or earshot, and increasing as she gets further away.

The “visualiser” (what *is* the word for something that provides feedback by means of pressure rather than sight or sound?) piece of the kit should be simple enough – it would basically be a very small stepper motor or something similar. But I’m not sure about the sensor side of things. Basically it’s a question of measuring the time for a signal to reach and return from the dog – but because we’re talking relatively small distances, I’d have thought that measuring the out-and-return of a radio pulse would be too short and error-prone to be reliable.

So then I wondered about measuring the difference between two GPS devices – but again, I’m not sure that they’d be accurate enough. Getting an accurate GPS fix in that sort of overgrown area could be tricky, so there’s likely to be too much error involved.

Or maybe radar-esque ultrasound? The “person” device squawks at one frequency, and the “dog” device squawks at a different frequency in return when it hears the first signal. The time difference between the send and receive is a measure of the distance. But that might be affected by echoes, and I’m not sure what effect blasts of ultrasound would have on the surrounding wildlife – or the dog, for that matter.

Exciting developments on the Interesting North front.

First, we have a date. Saturday 13th November is the day.

Secondly, we have a venue – and it’s a fantastic one. The Cutlers’ Hall right in the centre of Sheffield is one of the city’s hidden jewels – step through the door, and you enter a Tardis-like exhibition of Victorian civic and industrial pride at it’s finest. This is architecture that could only have been commissioned by bewhiskered Victorian steel magnates with barrels of spare cash and a severe inferiority complex about not being landed gentry. As you can probably tell, I think it’s going to be great.

Tickets will be on sale very soon, and will be around the £20 mark. Put the date in your diaries, and get in touch if you fancy speaking!

English Heritage is a non-Departmental Public Body that exists to protect and promote England’s historic environment. One of the tools at their disposal is listing, which applies protection to a building or site through the planning system. Crudely, it stops you putting plastic double glazing into your historic thatched cottage; or demolishing a factory designed by that world-famous architect.

There are a lot of listed buildings – about 374,081 of them – and they’re listed in a database which English Heritage made available to the Rewired Culture event. It appears to have been a dump of some kind of GIS system – it’s in a dBase format and has eastings, northings and polygons for the structures. There’s no information about the buildings other than a name and a very truncated street address (there’s no town data, for example), but you can at least identify them geographically.

Job #1 is converting the eastings and northings to latitude and longitude. That’s painful maths, but a one-off process and thankfully doable through some PHP functions which someone else previously written.   So a quick PHP script runs the conversion on the fly to convert from the supplied lat/long to the eastings/northings needed to interrogate the database.

Job #2 is being able to find out where the listed buildings around you are. This is another web service with a PHP backend that accepts a pair of lat/lon coordinates and a radius, and spits back a list of lat/lon coordinates of the buildings within the radius together with their names and street address.

I managed to get that pair of services more-or-less working during the day after a fair amount of tweaking, which just left the front-end piece – you can access the webservice at listedbuildings.adoptioncurve.net – it should be fairly self-explanatory.

Job #3 was entirely due to needing something to do on the 2-hour train ride back to Sheffield. This is a simple iPhone client which pick up your location from GPS and pings the aforementioned web service to grab a list of buildings in the locale. It then plots them as pins on the map to show what’s around you.

Because the resolution of the grid reference allows pretty accurate map placement, in theory it should be possible to go one step further and overlay the pins onto an augmented reality-style display. The idea would be to whip out your iPhone / Android device, point in the direction of the building in front of you and know at a glance whether it was listed or not. Then with another level of access into the back-end data (which English Heritage don’t appear to offer though any kind of API, yet) you could easily display the information that they hold about the structure.

I’m going to continue to polish up the various rough edges over the next few days, and then post the results up. I haven’t dug into the data’s usage conditions enough to know whether it would be possible to offer an iPhone app via the App Store, but assuming there’s no roadblocks to this I might give it a go. And it’ll be available for anyone who wants to try it in a beta form.

Russell Davies’ Interesting conference are something of an institution.  350 people cram into Conway Hall in London to hear interesting people talk about interesting things, ranging from Prozac-flavoured yoghurt, to a history of well-beloved ponies, to a live demonstration of the colour of Radio 4.  And that was just last year.

I’ve been to all three, taken photos of two and spoken at one.   And while they were all tremendous fun, all the Interesting conferences in the UK have taken place in London. With Russell’s blessing, it’s time to change that.

Interesting North will take place at some point this year somewhere that’s north of London and south of Edinburgh.  I’m not sure exactly where it will be, or when, or who will speak, or how much it will cost.   Those are all details that will get worked out between now and then, hopefully with the help of the kind of genial lunatics that make Interesting what it is.

So, this is a plea for help.  I’m going to need help to organise this, and I’m going to need interesting people to talk about interesting things to make it an Interesting day.  Give me a shout if you can help, and watch this space – and interestingnorth.com or interestingnrth – for further details.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about *how* The Game could operate. Not the “what”, exactly, but more about the underlying behaviour. I’m no expert on gaming, so I don’t know how much of this is the bleedin’ obvious – but it strikes me that there are a number of facets that need to be right in order for the whole process to work:

competition

There needs to be some level of competition between players, or between groups of players. Perhaps not in an overly overt “I can run faster / jump higher / kill more than you”, but it must at least be able to provide an incentive to improve and see how you’re performing against others. And there needs to be some competition with yourself, as well.

cooperation

At the same time as competition, there needs to be cooperation. I’m not sure whether this should be formal – you’re a member of a team; or informal – you help people as you go along. Maybe a mix of both – I like the idea of casual assistance, but there’s also something attractive about being part of a larger group with common aims. It seems that the trick here would be to avoid high transaction costs for a team, so that it doesn’t become an onerous task to coordinate.

completability

I hate games that just continue the same thing ad infinitum, just getting harder and harder. So there needs to be completable elements in there – not just “you’ve done this level, move onto the next”, but something more mission-oriented.

sustainability

At the same time as being completable, that needs to fit into a context of continuity – so that there’s some reason for me to keep coming back time after time without needing to start from scratch.

lightness of interaction

I envisage a lot of gameplay taking place in short chunks of downtime – waiting for a bus, idling away five minutes with a coffee, that sort of thing. So it’s not got to be *too* involved – I don’t want to miss my bus because I was engrossed.

geographic variability

If there’s a location-based component that relies on interactions with other people, it’s got to have enough hysteresis to allow for scenarios where you’re the only player at that spot. As far as I can tell, I’m pretty much the only person on my bus with an iPhone, so if the game relies on another iPhone user being at my bus stop, it’s not going to fly. I need to be able to alter my game horizon to take account of this.