Mudlark’s Academic Horizons.

Mudlark is building its ongoing relationships with universities in the Midlands which has grown from a long standing relationship with the Mixed Reality Lab (MRL) at the University of Nottingham.  MRL are key academic partners on two of our projects; the Heartlands mobile phone game and Love City SMS game.

Therefore we were delighted to hear that the University of Nottingham had received £8 million investment for the Horizon Digital Economy Research Hub which will guide the future of Ubiquitous Computing.  Active Ingredient are one of the artist groups connected to the hub, and the research from this will lead directly into commercial developments of games and locative/cross-platform products within Mudlark.

I am also excited to announce that I have been accepted as one of the first round of Phd students at the Doctoral Centre and will therefore be applying the work that I do as Production Director at Mudlark towards a Phd, which will enable me to focus on building partnerships, apply research to commercial models and ensure that Mudlark remains at the forefront of technologies and concerns within the digital economy.  This will support Mudlark to become a leader in cross platform technology and product development.

With this in mind I attended the first 2 workshops at the Horizon Hub that explored the thematic areas of transportation and creative industries.

The challenges for Horizon are based around:
1. Innovation
2. Human Interfaces
3. Infrastructure

The morning session was devoted to one of the named projects within the Horizon proposal based on Car Sharing.  Interesting presentations on cars.  UK CO2 emissions are rising due to transport but reducing in all other areas of UK activity.  Car’s are the biggest emissions (bigger by far than air flight – but this didn’t include international aviation). Source: DEFRA, 2007

There was a very interesting presentation by a guy from Jaguar/Land Rover’s R+D, talking about the “connected journey”.    Seeing the connected journey as:
* Pre-trip (modal)
* In-trip (dynamic)
* Post trip (static)

The afternoon session explored Rail Infrastructure control and management, this session was less interesting in terms of the Horizon themes as was based mainly on infrastructure.  Two interesting points from this included:

- Big issue of wasting data, so much data is collected but so little is used or useful – which I think is a big issue for Mudlark to explore in terms of passive data collection, making games and experiences using data.  Meaningful and responsible uses of data, how do we use data to reveal layers within society that is meaningful and encourages ownership of data by the people or place that generates the data?

Network Rail have a big yellow train that goes up and down the UK collecting data, with video and sensors built in – which I am very excited about. Very Thomas the Tank Engine for the new generation.

The second day of workshops looked at “A Day in the Park”, based around Horizon’s theme of Thrill, based on the exciting work MRL have been doing with Aerial’s Thrill Laboratory at Alton Towers.  Interesting themes for Mudlark include the idea of “Playing the Ride”, extending the experience of rides into gaming, developing what they call “flat rides” for family experiences and the connected day out.