I went up to London today to meet a friend from college. We decided that we wanted some free but interesting things to do, after taking a wander around Southbank we headed over to the museums.
First of all we went to the V&A, we went to an exhibition called ‘Power of Making‘ and it featured a whole host of randomly collated things. There was some quite interesting things like a terrifyingly realistic baby doll, a giant wooden robot and some crazy shoes. The one thing that stuck out most for me though was a dress. It was a piece called ‘QR U?’ and it’s definitely something that I now want to look in to and make something to do with.
Created by Thorunn Arnadottir, the dress was made for a singer and features a number of different QR codes that link to different parts of the singer’s website.
This is something that I want to incorporate into a future project, or something to even make in my spare time as work towards a new portfolio.
Afterwards we went over to the Science Museum to look at the ‘Player Festival’. It was described on the website as the ‘Ultimate Live Gaming Experience’ so I was quite interested to see what it was all about. However, upon arrival it seemed to be an exhibition where the most exciting stuff happened after hours. Not to say it was bad, it just didn’t live up to the expectations I had (whatever they may have been), the only part that seemed to be open was an FPS game, the idea being that you had to get from one side of the room to the other without being shot at.
I spoke to one of the guys who were in charge of the exhibition to find out how they were doing it. He said they were using Adobe Director and a series of sensors and projectors and they had used characters from Quake2. It was quite a clever idea, but I think that it probably could have been executed in a slightly more exciting way, for example, creating an environment for people to interact with when hiding from the characters. The room was completely black with about 10 screens hanging from the ceiling, one for each of the characters, but other than that there was nothing else there. Perhaps a few made up crates or ‘bullet holed’ walls to hide behind whilst waiting for the characters to turn around might make it a bit more exciting.
Overall it was a pretty good trip, and we went to a good frozen yoghurt place in Angel afterwards.
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