context-aware mediascape service launches

Over in Shanghai, we just announced the public launch of the mscapers.com web community for development and publishing of mediascapes. Ubicomp and geospatial media folks may know of this work via the long-running Mobile Bristol project and various public deployments (Yosemite, Tower of London, Riot 1831). Pervasive gaming fans may have caught the Sign of the Sorceress video, the alien invasion at 3GSM, or Ere Be Dragons at GDC. So now's your chance to play with the toys, get your hands on the tools and build some context-aware experiences of your own. It's beta of course, so things will start pretty simple and improve with community feedback. But even at this early stage the tools are very sophisticated and the games, walks and tours are immersive and fun.

To get started playing you need a mobile device with windows mobile and GPS capability, something like this is ideal but there are plenty of alternatives that should work. Last summer when I was on sabbatical building 'scapes, I used an old iPAQ with a bluetooth GPS module, and it worked pretty well.

So find some gear and go play -- I'd say start with Always Something Somewhere Else by audio artist Duncan Speakman, or maybe the Hidden Danger UXB minesweeper game. Then you can fire up the tools and inspect the script code to see how they were built. I have to warn you, it's pretty addictive once you get started.