TechWalk // Birmingham's Large-Scale Urban Game

Green Light!

2006-06-05T09:40:00.000-05:00

We just got the following email last night... now the fun begins!

Thanks for answering the questions we had for you. If there's still anything we need to discuss, the curators will be in touch. This email is to let you know that you are now officially confirmed to participate in Conflux. Welcome!

Will We or Won't We?

2006-05-21T22:45:00.000-05:00

On May 15th, we got a very exciting email...

We are happy to inform you that the Conflux 2006 curatorial team would like to include your proposed project in Conflux 2006. Before we can give you the final ok, we may have some logistical questions for your individual project. [...] Please reply to the questions by May 20th and we will follow up within a few days. We will be in touch again soon with more detailed information regarding the schedule, travel and planning for your project. Thanks again for your proposal. We look forward to working with you at Conflux 2006!

Best regards, Conflux 2006 Curatorial Team
http://conflux2006.glowlab.com

After answering their questions, we've got our fingers crossed that we'll get the go-ahead soon and get our travel plans in order.

Coming back for more!

2006-05-10T10:02:00.000-05:00

Good news! We've decided to stage our 2nd TechWalk event this summer during the 8th Annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival on Saturday September 23rd. Keep checking back here for more details.

If you can help in the staging/planning of this event, please join us at our monthly TechFriday breakfast meetings every 3rd Friday beginning in June leading up to the event in September. See the TechBirmingham Events Calendar for dates and location.

New photos

2005-10-19T12:35:00.000-05:00

The UAB student newspaper recently published a few more photos taken by their photographer the day of our September event. The team of the Oompaloompas was captured in the act! Click on the photos below to see them in more detail.

Article: Urban games come to Magic City

2005-10-07T10:12:00.000-05:00

Friday, October 7, 2005 / Daniel Walters, Contributing Writer
The official student newspaper of University of Alabama at Brimingham

London, San Francisco and New York are just a few of the cities that have hosted large-scale urban games that mix technology and fun on a city block scale.

Now, it’s Birmingham’s turn.

At the seventh annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, UAB’s Game Development Club, dubbed by members as UAB GameDev, teamed up with TechBirmingham to develop and produce Birmingham’s first large-scale urban game, Urban Othello.

"We had a great time. Twenty-seven people participated in four teams in what one might call an 'urban recess game' of Urban Othello" said Curtis Palmer of TechBirmingham.

Othello is a strategic board game which involves play by two parties on an eight-by-eight square grid with pieces that have two distinct sides. Pieces typically appear coin-like, with a light and a dark face.

The dark team must place a piece with the dark side up on the board, in such a position that at least one straight (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) line exists between the new piece and another dark piece, with one or more contiguous light pieces between them.

The game was played on Birmingham streets on a game board spanning approximately 36 square blocks. At each intersection, teams found three words they must demonstrate in a picture using anything or anyone at that corner.

"So if the three words are blue, man, and run, the team might find a man in a blue shirt and ask him to run, and take a quick picture," said Mr. Palmer.

Teams were each given a T-Mobile Sidekick II to take and submit pictures. This allowed teams to roam the game board freely and not have to return to the Harbert Center after each picture.

"I think this is cool because it is taking video gaming to a new level — you can be outside and play and get exercise," said Mark Dillavou, a computer programmer for UAB’s mechanical engineering department and adviser for UAB GameDev.

UAB’s Game Developer’s Club worked with TechBirmingham to develop the software for the game. UAB students worked out the technical details and made Palmer’s game a reality in less than a month.

"Having it in Birmingham really puts Birmingham on the map as far as technology," said Amy Dillavou, a UAB computer science major.

Photo Album of our first TechWalk event is now available

2005-09-26T13:15:00.000-05:00

We had a great time on Saturday... 27 people participated in four teams (see posting below) in what one might call an "urban recess game" of Urban Othello. In addition to the sample photos shown below you might want to view our online TechWalk slideshow or look at individual photographs in the TechWalk 2005 photoset on FLICKR. Be sure to add your comments on the photos you like and give feedback to the participants who had so much fun playing the game!

CTS scores an intersection with a photo of "Yellow, deny, frail"

The Auburn Architecture students win the "MOST OUTRAGIOUS" award for this challenge photo: sanctuary, forgive, horrible

A successful challenge photo taken with the T-Mobile Sidekick: Parisian, dislike, many -- UAB GameDev gives their fearless leader the finger

A picture of this scene being staged by the Oompaloompas appeared in the Birmingham News on the Sunday after the event

Each instersection on the game grid had a unique code to prove that the team was at a particular location

3 Teams got together afterwards and staged "Crazy, Pyramid, Flee" at the request of a media photographer from UAB

Game Over...

2005-09-24T16:18:00.000-05:00

Playing today were:

CTS "Geek Week Warriors" - event champions (pictured at right)
Auburn University Architecture students
UAB GameDev
UAB Engineering School "Oompaloompas"

In the first round, Auburn beat UAB GameDev. CTS tied with the Oompaloompas, but the tie was broken by a vote of their best stunts by the other 2 teams. In the second round, CTS beat Auburn and UAB GameDev beat the Oompaloompas.

Check out how the games went at UrbanOthello.com. Click on each of the matches in the left column to see the photos and Othello plays.

Game Day Details

2005-09-23T11:30:00.000-05:00

TOMORROW (Saturday) is the day!

Start Location -- Harbert Center on 4th Avenue North
Registration -- Opens at 9:30am. We'd prefer that you pre-register (see details in the next posting below) but you can register on site.
Game Play -- 10:00am until early afternoon. Each round is expected to last about an hour.
What to wear -- Comfortable clothing for outdoors plus running/walking shoes. Capes and costumes are strongly encouraged. The team with the most original uniforms/outfits will receive a bonus prize at the discretion of the judges.
Questions -- email curtis@techbirmingham.com anytime before or leading up to the game!

Interested in fielding a team?

2005-09-23T10:15:00.000-05:00

The event is FREE to play! Please send an email to info @ techbirmingham.com indicating that you are interested in fielding a team. Be sure to provide the following information:

Team Leader's name/email/cell phone		Team Name
How is your team associated together?		Number of players

PRIZES currently include 4 passes for all-movies access + awards ceremony on Sunday night, 4 Sidewalk t-shirts, a collectible Vulcan tree ornament, and loads of great T-Mobile goodies. Also, 4 passes to an exclusive, invitation-only Sidewalk bash on Saturday night will be awarded to the team with the most outrageous photo as judged by the organizers.

Article: Urban gaming takes to city streets

2005-09-23T05:40:00.000-05:00

Teams use camera phones to compete in board-game style challenges downtown

Friday, September 23, 2005 / KELLI HEWETT TAYLOR, News staff writer

It's been a hit in London, New York and San Francisco. Now cell phone-based, outdoor "urban gaming" comes to Birmingham Saturday during the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. "Having it in Birmingham really puts Birmingham on the map as far as technology," said Amy Dillavou, 21, a UAB computer science major who played her first test game this week. She plans to compete Saturday. Built on a four-year history of large-scale urban games in other cities, it uses strategies from the board game Othello.

It pits two teams against each other on a real-life game board, or grid. It is set along 36 downtown blocks, or intersections. Each team of four to six players uses a camera phone with Internet capability to download "challenges" at specific sites. On the city sidewalks, the teams act out their given scenes, based on three words. A team member snaps a photo with the phone and e-mails it to downtown judges for verification. Teams can track their competition on the picture phone. The team that "wins" the most intersections by acting out the scenes wins the game. T-Mobile has donated Sidekick II personal communications devices for the event.

"It resonates with the 18-30-year-old males and females," said Curtis Palmer, 41, of TechBirmingham, who brainstormed the local game. "When I describe it to people in their 50s, they look at me with blank stares." TechBirmingham is a not-for-profit organization that boosts technology-based business in Birmingham. Palmer based his idea on two other urban games, Gridlockd and Fiasco, both based in New York. Organizers are still looking for teams, who will compete in one-hour sessions from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Games start at the Harbert Center at 2019 Fourth Ave. N. Pictures from Tuesday's test game and free registration forms are available at www.techwalk.org .

Mark Dillavou, Amy's husband, and several UAB students worked out the technical details and made Palmer's game a reality in less than a month. "I think this is cool because it is taking video gaming to a new level - you can be outside and play and get exercise," said Dillavou, 22, a computer programmer for UAB's mechanical engineering department and adviser for UAB's Game Developer's Club.

Palmer is also planning more games. "I really hope as we start to do these more often that we will gain recognition for Birmingham among the other major cities doing this," Palmer said.

Our Test Event

2005-09-21T12:50:00.000-05:00

To test the software, students from Auburn and UAB converged for a test event yesterday. The photos below show them playing the games and staging the "challenge" photos. The test event game allowed each team to make seven moves. The graphic to the left shows the final placement of pieces after each team had 5 turns. See the full set of photos from the event on FLICKR.

Determining where to play on the grid

A successful challenge photo: 318, flee, crazy

Setting up the challenge photo for Walkway, Creep, and Friendly

Successful challenge photo taken with the Sidekick camera phone

TechWalk = T-Mobile Sidekicks on the Sidewalk

2005-09-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

When members of Birmingham's creative workforce take over their downtown city sidewalks for TechWalk this coming Saturday (September 24, 2005), they'll be using one of the coolest personal communications devices on the market for a game that blends technology with street theater. Just in time for Birmingham’s first large-scale urban game event, T-Mobile has become the official technology provider to TechWalk. Each team will play the game of "Urban Othello" with the T-Mobile Sidekick® II device, provided free of charge by T-Mobile for use in the game.

Urban Othello is run like Othello, a strategy game played on an 8x8 board, using discs that are black on one side and white on the other. Since Urban Othello is played outdoors on the city sidewalks, the board size has been reduced to a 6x6 grid. In the board game, each move is made by placing a disc on the board and flipping other discs to the team's color. For Urban Othello, the discs are played virtually through a website and viewed by the players via the Sidekick's web browser.

Since the TechWalk event is staged in concert with the 7th Annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, placing the team's disc will involve improvisational performances. Teams must first physically get themselves to the intersection of downtown Birmingham represented on the 6x6 game grid. Once there, they will be presented with a game challenge comprised of three words or phrases. A random set of props, actions, and wild cards will be displayed on the Sidekick screen. The team will be given a limited time to improvise a scene representing all the provided challenges and capture that scene with the Sidekick's built-in camera phone. Once a TechWalk judge accepts the digital image as satisfying the challenge, the game piece will be awarded and the opposing team will be given up to four minutes to play their turn. The game will continue until one team dominates the board or until the time limit is exceeded.

Urban Othello is modeled after past large-scale urban games conducted in other such great cities as London, New York, and San Francisco. The game played in Birmingham borrows heavily on components of two New York-based games, Fiasco and Gridlockd!, as projects of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Fiasco, otherwise known as Digital Street Game, is a game designed by Michele Chang of Intel Corporation's People & Practices Research Group and improved by Elizabeth Goodman of Confectious Design. The challenges of Fiasco inspired the performance aspect of Urban Othello. Gridlockd! is a game recently designed by Mohit SantRam. The idea of playing a game of Othello on the city-based game board was inspired by SantRam's Gridlockd!.

TechWalk is organized by TechBirmingham, a not-for-profit entity focused on growing Birmingham, Alabama's technology economy.

UAB Students Designing Urban Othello Game for TechWalk at Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival

2005-09-20T09:15:00.000-05:00

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Five students from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Game Development Club are developing a large-scale Othello game for an urban gaming event at Birmingham’s Seventh Annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival.

The Sidewalk Motion Picture Festival has partnered with TechBirmingham to transform 25 city blocks into an interactive game board on which up to 16 teams will become walking game pieces in a wireless version of the classic strategic game Othello. TechBirmingham asked the UAB club to design the game.

The goal of the game is to grid off downtown Birmingham as a virtual Othello game board. Players, four to six per team, will use a T-Mobile Sidekick® II PDA throughout downtown Birmingham trying to complete challenges and place their game pieces on a virtual grid to win the game.

There is still space available for teams and there is no cost to enter the game. For more information or to enter, go to http://www.techwalk.org/.

Media Contact:
Jennifer Lollar
(205) 934-3888
E-mail: lollar@uab.edu

Urban Othello

2005-09-13T19:55:00.000-05:00

The UAB GameDev group is hard at work developing the software for use at the TechWalk event. Many thanks are in order for Mark Dillavou for leading the effort!

From the beginning, Mark coined the name "Urban Othello" for the software under development and just recently published this logo. I'm impressed!! Luckily, the TechWalk "othello board" won't be this large or we'd be worn out running that far across town .

More exciting news soon... only 11 days left!

Planning Committee meeting this Friday morning

2005-09-12T10:59:00.000-05:00

We're going to meet this Friday to discuss the status of our planning efforts. We'll meet at the regularly scheduled time of TechFriday, held at the Athena Computer Learning Center from 7:45am to 9:00am (or so). Turning up Perimeter Park off of Highway 280, Athena in the first building on the left across from the Hilton. It is on the top floor in Suite 400 of the South building.

Come one, come all!

Article: "Fans will get chance to play at film fest"

2005-08-29T15:45:00.000-05:00

The Birmingham Business Journal ran a nice story about our effort in this past Friday's issue. Click here to read the full text. The story starts off with...

Motorists and pedestrians beware. If you see groups of four to six people behaving bizarrely on downtown Birmingham streetcorners the weekend of Sept. 23, it's all in good fun.

Birmingham's Sidewalks Become Digital Playground

2005-08-25T11:50:00.000-05:00

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Aug. 25, 2005 -- London, New York, San Francisco, and now Birmingham. On Sep. 24, the historic sidewalks of Birmingham's theatre district will be transformed into a large-scale urban game like those previously staged in several other cities worldwide. The 7th Annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival has partnered with TechBirmingham for the TechWalk event, a location-based game blending a wireless internet network, other technology systems, and performance art. Teams will traverse the urban grid of downtown Birmingham, improvising scenes suggested by an online random phrase generator. Digital images of the staged scenes will be uploaded to a server to win street intersections in a game modeled after the popular board game Othello.

“Major cities around the world already host urban games on their city streets,” said Curtis Palmer, president/CEO of TechBirmingham. “Birmingham's tech-savvy workforce is ready for this type of entertainment and we could not imagine a better time to introduce the game than during the immensely popular Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival.”

The TechWalk game will take place within a six-by-six-block area surrounding most of the Sidewalk festival venues. A map of the zone is available for viewing on the TechWalk website. Teams of 4 to 6 people are encouraged to sign up for this free event by visiting www.TechWalk.org where more details will be provided as the event date approaches.

TechWalk will be staged with the help of recruitment staff from ITAC Solutions. “This is a natural fit for us,” said Chase Morrow, partner and co-founder of the firm. “We are interested in linking Birmingham's growing technology workforce with all the great employment opportunities that an expanding tech economy brings.”

About Sidewalk:
The Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival is a project of the Alabama Moving Image Association, Inc., a publicly supported 501(c)(3) non-profit organization created to inspire, encourage and support films and filmmaking in Alabama. The festival is set for September 23-25 in Birmingham’s historic theatre district. For more information on the festival, please visit www.SidewalkFest.com.

About TechWalk:
TechWalk is a project of TechBirmingham, a not-for-profit entity focused on growing the Birmingham region's technology economy. It was formed in 2002 by the community to lead, support, and coordinate the start-up, attraction, growth, retention, and expansion of technology-based businesses, investments, and jobs for the entire Birmingham metropolitan region. For more information on TechBirmingham and its other activities, please visit www.TechBirmingham.org. For more information on TechWalk, please visit www.TechWalk.org. A newsreader Atom.XML feed is available for the TechWalk effort.

Our city streets as the game board for TechWalk

2005-08-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

Parks are represented by letters... A is Linn Park and B is Kelly Ingram Park. Festival venues are represented by numbers:

Alabama Power
Alabama Theatre
Birmingham Museum of Art
The Brick Room
Carver Theatre
The Harbert Center / Tech Center
Rushton Theatre @ McWane Center
Sidewalk Cafe at G
McWane Center "Red Carpet" Kids' Activity

The game will be run from the "Tech Center," located within the Harbert Center (#6T). Click on the map above for a larger higher-resolution image (600K).

What is TechWalk? / FAQ

2005-08-25T10:55:00.000-05:00

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is TechWalk?
TechWalk is a large-scale urban game using the physical world of a 6x6 block area of downtown Birmingham, Alabama as a virtual game board. Using wireless technology teams of people will compete in games of Othello, capturing grid intersections by completing a film-themed challenge with a camera phone, by uploading the images to a centralized server. Challenges will be in the form of performance art using a combination of noun, verb, and adjective randomly assigned to the team when they arrive at the intersection. The game will be time-limited so that an overall winner can be determined before the evening's screenings at Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. The public is invited to observe the game in progress but can also track the progress online via the web.
How Do You Play?
16 teams of between 4 and 6 people each are expected to be accommodated in our game. The game board is made up of 36 blocks of downtown Birmingham (2nd Ave N to 7th Ave N and 17th St N to 22nd St N). Using a PDA, the team will determine where they wish to place their virtual token. They will quickly move to that location and request a challenge from the server. Together, all but one of the team members must act out the challenge sequence and the remaining team member will use a camera phone to capture the image and upload it to the server. A moderator will visually inspect the uploaded photograph and award the team's token to that location. The game is over when all intersections are claimed or if a prescribed time limit has been reached. The winner of the round is determined by the total number of colored tiles placed/captured according to the rules of Othello.
Technology to be used:
This game will make use of a wireless network, digital capture devices (camera phones), display devices (PDA), and personal cell phones (for communicating between team members if they send out scouts).
Challenges:
Obviously, this is our first attempt at running this game. Wireless network latency may be an issue, but we don't expect to have to share this network with many others during the event. While we can accomplish the effort with nothing more than walkie-talkies and marshals, we'd like to play the game totally electronically... which will allow us to scale to virtually any number of groups that wish to play the game.
Why Play?
This should be a fun, fast-paced game on the city streets. Teams will be pitted against each other in a random manner, intersections on the grid must be claimed within a prescribed time limit, and your team will have to move quickly and travel across up to six city blocks to position your team for the next challenge. What could be more fun?
Who's behind TechWalk?
While TechBirmingham is the lead organizer of the game, several other groups have been engaged to help out. ITAC Solutions is a sponsor of the event and will be helping to manage the logistics. Auburn University's Urban Studio students and instructors will be studying and documenting the game as part of their assigned curriculum this semester. And, UAB's GameDev group is creating the Urban Othello game itself.
Who Created TechWalk?
This effort is being led by Curtis Palmer of TechBirmingham. It is actually a blend of several different similar efforts undertaken over the past few years primarily in New York City (see our blog posting about large-scale urban games for details). However, none of this could be accomplished without the steering committee members and other volunteers.

Gaming Goes Mobile: Issues and Implications

2005-08-24T17:16:00.000-05:00

A new research paper from Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society predicts the emergence of mobile gaming as the "next big thing" for the wireless industry. Here's the abstract:

A recent report by the telecommunications research firm Analysys predicts that mobile games will replace ringtones, logos and other personalisation services as one of the key drivers of the mobile market. Despite the rapid growth of the mobile gaming market, there appears to have been little critical analysis of this phenomenon. The paper aims to investigate the industrial and social implications of mobile gaming, by bringing together some of the current research on both mobile communications and computer games.

Beginning with a broad overview of the major stakeholders in the market, the paper examines how mobile gaming functions as a vehicle for convergence, bringing together previously disparate industries around a common form of content. It also examines the regulatory complexities that arise when gaming becomes mobile, and in particular how the rise of technologies like location-based services might impact on issues such as privacy.

[ download full article as PDF format ]

Big Games, Big Cities

2005-08-23T14:59:00.000-05:00

With Birmingham joining the ranks of cities that host large-scale urban games via TechWalk, we thought it'd be great to show the games by cities and launch dates, rather than a list of just the games as previously posted. This list includes games we've found since our original list was created:

New York City, NY - Digital Street Game (2004), Gridlockd! (2005), Chalk-A-Block (2005), Pac-Manhattan (2004), TAG (2003)
London/Bristol/Manchester/Cambridge, UK - Uncle Roy All Around You (2004), Noderunner (2003), Pirates! (2000), Can You See Me Now? (2004), CitiTag (2004)
San Francisco, CA - The Go Game (2001)
Los Angeles, CA - Pirates! (2000), Close Encounters (2003)
Minneapolis, MN - Conqwest (2004)
Denver, CO - Conqwest (2004)
Seattle, WA - Conqwest (2004)
Salt Lake City, UT - Conqwest (2004)
Phoenix, AZ - Conqwest (2004)
Vancouver, Canada - Navigate the Streets (2005)
Toronto, Canada - Navigate the Streets (2005), Manhunt (2005)
Rovaniemi, Finland - Pirates! (2000)
Rotterdam, Netherlands - Can You See Me Now? (2003)
Köln, Germany - Can You See Me Now? (2004)
Barcelona, Spain - Can You See Me Now? (2004)
Portugal - Undercover (2003)
Austrailia - I Like Frank (2004)
Singapore - GunSlingers (2003)
Tokyo - Can You See Me Now? (2005), Mogi (2003)
Hong Kong - Undercover (2003)

Did we miss any? We want this list to be as complete and accurate as possible.

Planning Committee meeting this Wednesday

2005-08-22T17:36:00.000-05:00

As we prepare for the press conference on Thursday, at which we'll announce the TechWalk project, we need to get back together and work through some logistics. Please join us at 9am at Highlands Coffee for about an hour. Several committee members will be engaged with the 8am Catalyst Steering Committee meeting, so look for us at the back table up the steps past the counter.

Geeks Without Borders

2005-08-18T16:57:00.000-05:00

Check out the story Geeks Without Borders from the Slate ezine. It's an article from February 2003 which talks about the emergence of large-scale urban games. The quote from Howard Rheingold's 2002 book, Smart Mobs, almost predicts the emergence of TechWalk (well, it could be the chicken and the egg issue <smile>):

"... the combination of cheap wireless devices, urban density, and teenagers is creating a new model of sidewalk theater."

Research behind the games

2005-08-15T16:31:00.000-05:00

TechWalk takes the best of prior efforts (see urban games entry below) in the field of large-scale urban games and puts it together in a way that we hope will be better in many ways. That said, here are a number of research papers that helped define the TechWalk effort:

Play Othello Online

2005-08-15T11:08:00.000-05:00

You can play Othello via web interface as a way of preparing for TechWalk... see http://www.rainfall.com/othello/. Of course, you could also play the Microsoft Internet Reversi against another live person to get the idea of how the game is played

Planning committee this afternoon

2005-08-11T12:42:00.000-05:00

If you know about this blog, then you're invited. We're having a meeting this afternoon at Auburn's "Urban Studio" on the 3rd floor of the Center for Regional Planning and Design (formerly the Young & Vann building) downtown. It's at the corner of 18th Street N and 1st Avenue N across the street from the Birmingham Police HQ. We'll run from about 3:30 to 5:00pm.

How Urban Gaming Works

2005-08-06T11:58:00.000-05:00

There's a great article describing urban gaming at http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/urban-gaming.htm.

Some fear Pac-Man will be allowed to run amok through city streets

2005-08-03T19:04:00.000-05:00

Interesting article below... hope we don't run into the same histeria here about running our game!

Canada
Some fear Pac-Man will be allowed to run amok through city streets
CanWest News Service
167 words
6 May 2004
National Post
NationalA8English
(c) 2004 National Post . All Rights Reserved.

Canadians are debating the logic of large-scale urban games as New York University students plan to turn the streets of Manhattan into a giant Pac-Man grid. "There has been a lot of interest in doing something like this because it's kind of the ultimate in community engagement," says Suzanne Boyd, of Calgary's Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts. She is proposing a large-scale game for Alberta's centennial in 2005. But Paul Newell, director of the games division of the Art Institute of Vancouver worries the concept will lead to potentially dangerous games such as Manhunt hitting the streets. "The nice thing about a [tabletop] game is that everything is under the programmers' and designers' control," he said. "I don't think there was a huge chance of Pac-Man getting run down by a semi-trailer in the video game."

Planning Committee

2005-07-30T09:09:00.000-05:00

I am forming the planning committee for the TechWalk effort. If you are interested in volunteering for this event, please post a comment here. Identify what you want to be involved in... logistics, technology back-end development, marketing, soliciting teams, fund raising, etc. etc. etc.

We'll probably meet in the 2nd week of August and lay out a plan of action to 'announce' the project toward the end of the month, so that teams have enough time to form during September.

Confirmed committee members include:

Andre McFadden
Cheryl Morgan
Chris Conroy
Sharron Mendel

Large scale urban games/activities

2005-07-29T23:31:00.000-05:00

The following is a set of large scale urban games/activities under consideration for the TechWalk effort during SideWalk. We are leaning towards a combination of the Digital Street Game and Gridlockd! Teams that are eliminated from the game will be invited to participate in the Tagging effort of downtown Birmingham and/or may be invited to participate in a geocache hunt.

Large Scale Urban Games

Digital Street Game / aka Fiasco -- involves video/still capture during game... can use wifi (pretty cool)
The Go Game
Gridlockd!
Chalk-A-Block
Conqwest - Big game + treasure hunt + phone cam + semacode + giant animal totems (yikes!)
Urban Challenge

Digital Tagging

Yellow Arrow - placing physical yellow stickers with a unique # around our city where anyone can later SMS (aka "text message") the # and receive information about the place the Yellow Arrow is pointing
FoundCity - capturing digital images via camera phones and "tagging" the picture to an address available for review on the FoundCity website
CitiTag
Click! - The Urban Adventure Game
MapHub

Scavenger/Treasure Hunts

Geocaching with the Alabama Geocachers Association - using GPS units to find hidden objects/treasure
Close Encounters
Benchmark Hunting - using GPS units to find USGS benchmarks
Treasure Hunt
San Francisco Treasure Hunts
MobileHunt
aZones Treasure Hunt

Other - these are games that probably are not extensible enough for our effort

Human Scale Chess Game
Urban Pac-Manhatten
ManHunt
Urban Golf
I like Frank
Uncle Roy All Around You - funny name, cool game from the UK
Can You See Me Now?
Citysnapper game
Node Runner - the original was in NYC, but this one is from London
Navigate The Streets
CityPong - still only a concept

Preference will be given to activities that involve technology (of course!) and can be tied in to the multimedia nature of the SideWalk festival itself.

Here's a descriptive "Manifesto" about Big Games. Also, here's a nice listing of other mobile-phone and pda-based outdoor games.

Know of any others we should consider? Have comments about what is on the list? Please post a comment!! Check back often... we'll be adding more as we find them.

Technology and Tourism?

2005-07-25T18:05:00.000-05:00

I just came across a research paper about using technology and "play" to drive city tourism. Although written in 2003, it discusses different concepts explored in Rome, Italy. After I better digest Anne Galloway's article, I think it might be worthy to contact her about becoming an advisor in our effort. Hmm...

TechWalk @ Sidewalk Film Festival

2005-07-08T13:37:00.000-05:00

TechBirmingham is evaluating becoming a partner in the Sidewalk Film Festival this September. This blog, accessible via www.TechWalk.org, is where we'll share our ideas about engaging the technology crowd with the production folks and film buffs. Please feel free to suggest ideas and/or comment.