Channel 4 – Heartlands Demo.

Last week we went to London for a presentation to Channel 4 of our mobile phone/bio sensing game Heartlands.  Me (Rachel) and Matt stayed in my aunt and uncle’s flat near Channel 4’s HQ, preparing to show Heartlands to Channel 4 people. We spent Sunday afternoon checking the map works in the area (the heart of London, Westminster – round the corner from the houses of parliament) and sorting out what we thought was the cold affecting the heart rate monitors but was something way more easy to sort out. Playing round the streets of power in London was the best we have ever seen the game. So fingers crossed for the presentation.

C4 day. Started with a cup of tea at the pret a manger across the road from the flat, a quick chat about questions they may ask us and then over to C4 HQ and the 4IP floor to set up and do some final runs… all appeared to be working fine…

We had lunch in the cool and cheap C4 canteen, great building although supposedly very leaky. Had carribbean stew as Gok Wan and various other slightly familiar media-y TV types sat down to their own media lunch.

At 2pm 3 members of the committee arrived excited and it seemed quite nervous about plugging in, sadly Claire was poorly and so wasnt there. We set them up with our prototype kit in all it’s glory and clunkyness and took them out. Little did we know that 2 of them were marathon runners and the other equally as fit, they had to work really hard to get their heart rates into optimum but it was a close game, pictures on Mudlark’s flickr site… http://flickr.com/photos/wearemudlark/

They returned without a hitch and seemed to enjoy themselves and the game, despite the low heart rates between them. We discussed the issues around it, the hardware and the possibilities of building new heart rate monitors or plugging into existing proprietry hardware and talked about the opportunities for development for the platform.

The result of the demo is still quite vague and we are left with no idea when we might hear… but as far as we could see it went as well as we hoped and the rain missed us, despite the dark thundery clouds that gathered as we were setting the game up.

So fingers crossed all round…