It's all over now... We came, we saw and WE CONQUERED! At least as far as I'm concerned. Here's a little rear view glimpse of todays exhibition:
The exhibition started at 9:00 but our group met up at 8:30 in order to plan the day and in worse case scenario fix malfunctioning equipment. We've had problems with the Wall Frame each time we inserted the batteries once we've removed them. So in order to avoid this problem we let the batteries remain in the Wall Frame during the night. We've also had problems with short range on the wireless connection. This problem was solved with some sellotape on the wall. None of these earlier problems caused any headaches today and everything went as smooth as it possibly could. The Wall Frame and program worked great the whole twelve hours the exhibition lasted (the exhibition closed at 21:00).
Needless to say it has been a long day with not so much to do. There were alot of visitors and most of them tried out our Sound Memo (as the official title of the game is) and most of them found it enjoyable, some weren't impressed at all while others really loved the game and played it more than once and even had internal tournaments among themselves. To see these people laugh and have a good time with our game rally gave me (and probably the rest of the group) a real energy boost. Especially adults found our game amusing thanks to it's simplicity. Everyone have at one time in their life played traditional Memory. The twist of our game made that old game interesting again.
We also had our projects evaluated and got feedback from Björn Renner and Petter Warnsberg. I was a little concerned that they would say that we hadnt tried enough since our game is based on pretty basic technology and was controlled by a program made in JavaScript which hardly qualifies as an advanced programming language. Luckily I was wrong. They both found the idea interesting and liked the simplicity of it. Petter actually thought that it was an achievement to program the game in JS, which is nice to hear.
While Björn and Petter went from booth to booth we also recorded a video of the entire exhibition field which will be edited and sent to the Hyper Island students in Stockholm, so that they can experience some of our technology as well.
To round things off. The exhibition was a success for us since everything worked fine the whole day and there were alot of people that really enjoyed playing our game. Tomorrow we will have som final evaluation of the module and then it's off the next module called "Concept and Development". New module, new groups and whole new challenges.
Kasper Kuijpers has a strong finger as he presses one of the sound panels on the Wall Frame
Some visitors test their sound memory skills. The black thing on the wall is the wireless receiver
Alva Nachenius test the game. The program running the game is visible on the laptop. It keeps track of which panels have already been taken as well as counts points, tries and presses on taken panels.