Nearly two years ago, this panda and I went to Howduino in Liverpool where he underwent surgery to implant tri-colour LEDs and a moving-coil meter into his protesting body. Today we went to Howduino at the Temple Works in Leeds, and the surgery was completed.

In his midriff he’s got an old aircraft fuel-flow meter – it’s basically a moving coil voltmeter with a dial calibrated from 0 to 800 pounds per hour. From the markings on the back, it looks like it came from a 1950s-vintage V bomber – possibly a Valient.

This was born of a distinct lack of web data sources that are calibrated in hundreds of pounds per hour (and that have a maximum of 800), and general hair-trigger punctuality geekiness.

It takes me exactly 4 minutes to walk to the nearest bus stop, but if I leave with more than 8 minutes to spare I end up feeling like a delinquent teenager while I hang around the shelter waiting for the bus to arrive. So this panda is connected to the interwebs via an Arduino, and is polling Travel South Yorkshire’s really-rather-badly-designed Your Next Bus site.

He shows the number of minutes to the next bus arriving – less than 4, and there’s no point in me leaving the house because I won’t get to the stop in time. More than 7 minutes, and I don’t need to go yet.

The electronics side of it is fairly trivial – it takes a PWM output from the Arduino and feeds that through a voltage divider to step the signal down to a maximum of 0.15V (which is the full-scale deflection voltage of the meter). There’s a variable resistor in the divider so that the accuracy of the meter can be tweaked as needed.

The code is also fairly simple, using the Arduino’s Ethernet and HTTP libraries to access the web, and the TextFinder library to parse the page that’s grabbed from the SYT site. I’ll put the code up on Github in a day or so.

In the video, he’s in test mode – so he’s polling a random number on a page on my site, which is why the dial is flying around all over the place. Eventually (i.e. when I next go to a Howduino event, probably) his eyes will light up as well, and will fade from green to amber to red as the bus gets closer. But that will probably take another two years…

Now that the dust has more-or-less settled, write-ups of Interesting North are starting to emerge around the web. So far, they’ve been really positive – which is a slightly strange feeling, especially where people are crediting me directly. It wasn’t really me – I was just one of the catalysts – so it seems a little unfair on the speakers and everyone else involved to heap too much praise in my direction.

I lived with the organising for about nine months, from actually making the decision to do this to the day itself. For much of that time, not much happened – the real hard work, if that’s the right term for it, was crammed into the last few weeks. And I didn’t do it all myself – although doing things by committee is never the *most* efficient of processes, there were a hardcore of people ready and willing to pitch in with physical assistance when it was needed. I folded 300 tshirts, and packed 300 bags, and the family keyed 300 booktitles into BookCrossing. Students at Sheffield Hallam made 200m of bunting. Greg single-handledly produced a newspaper. And so it went on.

At the outset, my main fear was that it would be a damp squib rather than an abject failure. That it would be only a few people who turned up, speakers wouldn’t show, the AV wouldn’t work properly, and the reaction would be one of sympathy and “oh, well, never mind” rather than outrage at outright disaster. Once the ticket sales ticked passed the hundred mark, I could relax slightly. Then it sold out, so the concern about attendance diminished. But then a whole new set of stresses emerge – did I remember to check whether the AV desk could feed the video camera with sound? Would we be able to get 250 people across the road for lunch and back inside an hour?

If I’m absolutely honest, I didn’t enjoy the day. Not because it went horribly wrong – it didn’t – but because if it *had* have gone horribly wrong, there would have been nothing I could do about it. It’s a little like watching a child pedal away from you the first time you take the stabilisers off the bike. There’s a few moments when you can run alongside to catch them, but once they accelerate away from you, there’s nothing you can do except watch. And once I’d hit play on the titles video, that was it – whether it worked or not was out of my hands. Fortunately I had a professional taking care of linking everything together, and watching Joel Fryer in action made me *very* glad that my part in the standing up and talking was a minor one. He makes it look easy, but it’s not. Put me on a stage with a subject I’m comfortable with, and I’m very rarely nervous – but I find ad-hoc presentation strangely terrifying.

Being completely unable to control how events unfold, and yet still be immersed in them, is a strange and not-entirely comfortable feeling. And standing at the back of the room, the better to be able to warn the catering team for the moment that the coffee was needed, it was very difficult to get a feel for how people were reacting. So I found myself worrying – pointlessly as it turned out – about the overrunning schedule, and the occasional sound glitches, and the slightly dodgy acoustics. If you’re watching the speakers concentrating more on the clock and the PA than what they’re saying, you’re probably better off finding other things to do – so I spent most of the day behind the scenes rather than in the hall. Which is a shame, because I missed some genii by all accounts.

From the feedback I’ve had, both online and in real life, I was worryingly needlessly. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, including the speakers, and there have been plenty of people asking if I’m going to do it again. The short answer is that I don’t know. I’m not sure how compatible it would have been with a “real” job – fortunately Rattle were very understanding about the time sink that Interesting North became, but it would have been a lot harder if I’d been sneaking around trying to do this in someone else’s time. It would also be highly dependent on sponsorship – I was very fortunate to have some very generous sponsors, but without them it would have been a major financial risk for me personally. And without the team – all of whom have commitments of their own – none of it would have happened.

Of course – once I’ve caught up with sleep, got rid of the detritus of cardboard boxes that are left over and decided what to do with all the spare books and coloured pencils, I’m probably going to feel differently about it. So the answer to the question is a qualified “yes” at the moment. It would be a shame to waste the goodwill; now that the word is out about what Interesting North was, it should be easier to shift the tickets. Hopefully the sponsors will want to be involved again. And the memory of sitting bolt upright in bed panicking about whether I’d told people the right date will have faded.

So see you next year. Maybe. Probably.

A while ago, inspired by Russell’s originals, I had the idea of putting on an Interesting somewhere north of London.

Sheffield, to be precise.

I honestly didn’t know if the idea would fly – it’s all very well doing this kind of thing in London, with its resident population of creative types with time and money to spare.  But Sheffield’s not really like that.

But Interesting North sold out today.  Which suggests I was worrying unduly.

There’s still lots left to do before November 13th, but I think this might turn out to be fun.

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.

My former Headshift colleague Felix Cohen posted about making ARGs local and social a few days ago, and his post prompted me to dust a post of my own which has lurked in a drafts folder for a few months.

Geolocation is now ubiqiutous if you’ve got the right device in your pocket.  What was the preserve of dedicated and single-purpose devices a couple of years ago is now embedded into GPS-enabled mobiles.  I can whip out my iPhone and figure out my location to within a few metres anywhere I can get line-of-sight to the satellites.

At the same time, geolocation is being embedded into the fabric of the web – any photo that I take with my iPhone can be uploaded to Flickr and automagically geotagged.  More and more Wikipedia articles which relate to a physical location have lat/long data associated with them.

And the combination of services and devices has enabled play-like apps – I can check into a location with Foursquare or Gowalla, and stalk my friends as they do the same.

But at the moment, it’s a bit limited and a bit boring – all you can really do with these apps is check in and out of places – once you’ve done it a couple of times, becoming “mayor” of a location strikes me as fairly pointless.

Picking up and dropping random items has some (limited) appeal, but Gowalla’s current implementation is lacking the Pokemon factor – the objects have no intrinsic value, so once you’re done with the “oh, a luggage tag!” novelty factor there’s not a lot else to get excited about.  I don’t find myself making a special trip to *that* Starbucks in the hope of finding the planet’s only purple three-legged Snorblax.

What this needs to really grab me is a cross between Gowalla-esque location “services” and geocaching.   Treasure hunting is something that appeals to most people’s inner child in a big way – I’m willing to bet everyone has drawn a treasure map at some point in their lives.  Geocaching makes this play into something socially-acceptable for adults, even if hunting down Tupperware boxes full of trinkets is fairly high on the geek behaviour continuum.

The physical nature of the caches prevents geocaching being something completely spontaneous.  What I want is something that will fill in the odd 5 minutes here and there – inbetween buses, or when the train is standing at an intermediate station.

I started hacking together an iPhone app that would scrape the interwebs for geotagged “stuff” that was relevant to that location – a sort of ethereal Blue Plaque database.  A quick moment of discovery – “hey, look who used to live around the corner” – would be enough to dispel the transitory boredom.

The problem with this is that it’s probably not dynamic enough to maintain long-term utility.   If I’m standing at the same bus stop three times a week, it’s not going to take me long to exhaust the possibilities of geolocated data unless it’s somewhere that generates a lot of Flickr-style data.  And the bus stops I frequent aren’t that photogenic.   That idea breaks down completely if it’s somewhere trivial – like a coffee shop queue, for example.

So moving on from there, I started wondering what would happen if you combined existing information with user-generated ephemera.  So as well as “Sir Worthy Citizen lived just down the road” and “Flickr users took these photos nearby”, you could add your own geocaches.  I’m still not *quite* sure what form they’d take – tweets would be an obvious one.   It would be a little bit like virtual digital graffiti – a virtual bus shelter I could scribble on while queueing for my double decaff skinny mochalatechino.   The back-and-forth banter that Twitter can generate seems like it could be at home on a virtual toilet wall.

I also quite like the idea of collecting virtual “things”.  The challenge there is making the “things” worth collecting, or at least quirky enough to be worth bothering with.   Pokemon and Top Trumps are the most immediately-obvious models, but I don’t know how you initiate that kind of collectable – that’s what Gowalla does with the luggage tags and mocking birds, but they’re so random I don’t *really* care about them.  And there’s no user creation involved, either -  I can’t drop a “packet” of antiacids at Pizza Hut even if I wanted to.

Ultimately you’d want to overlay the kind of competitive behaviour that Felix was talking about in his post – maybe not fighting in the D&D sense, but certainly something that could be cooperative.   Ideally it would be something that could build upon a virtual equivalent of the oh-so-English nod of recognition that you give to someone you see every day in the same place, but never engage with any further.

I like the idea of emergent “communities” of people enabled by digital echos of their past and future presence.   And if I can actually *engage* with them in a playful way as well…

And I suppose it doesn’t have to be trivial, either – could you combine spotting duff streetlights a la Fixmystreet with a competitive factor?  “Congratulations, you’re the reigning spotter of potholes in S10!  But beware – X is rapidly catching up with you after spotting a graffitied bus shelter around the corner…”