Just got back from an interesting visit to RWTH Aachen. It felt awesome to be back in what I now start considering as my second hometown, alas it was only for a work meeting, which lasted for two hours. But what a meeting it was! Marcus, my supervisor, asked me last week, during the summerschool, if I would be wanting to visit the MediaLab in Aachen together with him; always curious and happy to find out new things and make new contacts I happily replied yes to his question. After a small trip from our beloved OUNL to RWTH (actually it took the GPS receiver longer to get a signal than the trip lasted), Marcus, Wim and I were received by prof. Jan Borchers in what they called Media Space an interactive room containing three smartboards and loads of Apple hardware: I think the namesake would have drooled seeing how much!
First followed an interesting presentation of Tico Ballagas about two of his projects. One, called Rexplorer, was an interactive GPS based city tour that guided the user through the city of Regensburg, Germany and let him or her explore its past. The tour was presented as a game in which the tourist has to wander through Regensburg in search of paranormal activity. On detection of this activity, the tourist had to make a special incantation, swinging his want in a special way, to come in contact with the ghosts of a past long forgotten. The ghosts would tell the tourist something about the past of Regensburg, but also would give him some task to fulfill. Pretty interesting I say.
After that, Tico presented iStuff, a very interesting, though slightly more technical presentation. iStuff is a technical framework for ubiquitous computing that makes it possible to abstract most of the difficulties of using sensor and actuators and thus makes fast prototyping of mobile applications possible, and all that in Java! This part of the presentation was really really interesting for me, because iStuff will probably solve some of my problems. Especially, since I have been struggling to get the ContextBlogger to work and more importantly I start to realise that I cannot do all the programming work on my own, how much I would want to… I just do not get enough time to start everything from scratch. Needless to say that after arriving home, I immediately started checking out the toolkit. Seems promising so far.
Tico’s presentation finished and I would have thought we would go home afterwards, but nothing of the sort. Prof. Borchers took us to a little room besides the Media Space and introduced us to one of his students working on a new way of HCI: a table that displayed a computer-generated image that could be manipulated with your hands. Marcus, Wim and I gazed at the table in delight and tried our best to play the game presented on it. Finally, not succeeding in bringing all lemmings safe to their home, we went back to the Media Space. Another presentation about the capabilities of the Media Space, which might be pretty interesting for OUNL. Actually it turned out to be a fruitful visit, that gave us all enough food for thought. Also, the bonds between RWTH and OUNL might be tightened, because Marcus invited Borchers both for a return visit to OUNL and to give a guest lecture at the next Winterschool in Innsbruck, hope he accepts!