Maker Faire UK – Newcastle

Got back home from an amazing Maker Faire UK – the first one to hit our shores, held in Newcastle. Super tired so just a quick thank you to everyone involved with a fuller roundup to come tomorrow.

Also got home to a message from Liz Ainge who made this wicked video of lookandlisten AV night that we were at 2 weeks ago. Enjoy!

< < CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO! > >

Bugs / Tweaks we have found so far..

Since we started work on FriiSpray in October, we have taken the setup to a variety of different conferences and events which has been great fun. along the way we have come across plenty of bugs / fixes that need implementing in the software that we thought we’d share to try and get some development going!

- It would be nice to have an indication of when a particular colour is selected in the palette – perhaps a border around the current colour.

- Sometimes, when drawing from the drawing space onto the menu bar, the software gets confused and doesn’t get the ‘off’ click, resulting in a straight line to the next cursor position – can be very annoying if somebody has spent a particularly long time on a piece.

- A lot of people have requested an ‘undo’ function – one or more steps.

- A ‘Fill’ option was initially kept out by us as we were trying to maintain the ‘graffiti’ aesthetic, but we have since realised this may be a nice addition. ‘Fill with video/dynamic content’ would be really cool – but might have to wait until we port to Processing / some other language.

- There is currently no background colour available on the palette – could fix this by either changing the background colour or adding the b/g colour to the palette.

- Would be nice to be able to change the background to a picture/photo, or change colour easily within the menu.

There’s probably more bugs that need looking at but there’s a healthy list here. So, c’mon people – get stuck in! You can download the software / source code from the software page. We’d love to spend more time on the software but our software man is knee deep in ‘proper’ work at the minute and we’re treading water. Any questions just get in touch

FriiSpray confirmed for MAKEr Faire – Newcastle 14-15 March

We’ll be heading up to the UK’s first MAKEr Faire, held in Newcastle on the 14th + 15th of March. We’ll be demoing the hardware, experimenting with new IR tracking techniques and generally having a good make-y / hacking-y weekend. Looking forward to it!

FriiSpray – ‘Where’s your Head at?’ Showcase

FriiSpray were at the ‘Where’s Your Head At?’ showcase event on Friday 20th February, to a crowd of students keen to try their hand at virtual graffiti. We had characters, plants and even a ‘draw-off’ between about 5 people – all adding to a communal drawing [that to be honest ended up a little messy!]

There are more photos + images from the event on our flickr page: FLICKR HERE!

Thanks to everyone who took part and made the event as fun as it was!

FriiSpray at Leeds Twestival

FriiSpray were proud to be part of Leeds’ Twestival event last night. For those that don’t know, ‘Twestival‘ is a charity event based around the online ‘micro-blogging’ / social networking / whatchya-call-it service / app: Twitter. Apparently, over 175 cities worldwide took part in raising money for charity:water.

The Leeds event turned out to be a great success, with well over £2,000 worth of raffle prizes won, a Wii Mario Kart tournament, food, drinks and a presentation by Jeff Allen about water communities in Africa.

A lot of fun was had – FriiSpray flickr pics now up on our Flickr Stream

FriiSpray at Apple Eurocreator workshop, Leeds

FriiSpray was set up as part of a recent workshop event – the Apple Eurocreator day workshop for school children to get their hands on some Macs and get creative. There was plenty of interest in our work and proved popular with the students taking part in the day’s activities. In between getting to grips with the Apple Mac software to make a podcasts and short animations students were encouraged to try out FriiSpray to see what our virtual graffiti was like to use. The latest version of the FriiSpray software seemed stable and the students provided useful feedback about the system.

Images made using FriiSpray during the day can be seen on our Flickr account now! – http://www.flickr.com/photos/friispray/

Booking confirmed: ‘Where’s Your Head At?’ Event at OBH

FriiSpray are excited to announce another booking for the ‘Where’s Your Head At?’ student event to take place at the Old Broadcasting House, Leeds on the 20th February. The equipment will be set up from 10:00 – 16:00 and students from Leeds Met are welcome to drop by and try FriiSpray out for themselves.

See you there!

FriiSpray Promo Vidd

look and listen

FriiSpray – Infra-red Graffiti

FriiSpray Flickr now active

We now have the FriiSpray Flickr account and group set up for the images generated by users of the installation:

http://flickr.com/photos/friispray/

Add your own photos of the install to the group!

FriiSpray presents at O’Reilly UK Ignite North

We were proud to be a part of the first O’Reilly Ignite meetup in the UK, even more so as it was in our home town of Leeds. There were plenty of interesting and amusing presentations across a wide range of topics and we had a great night.

We set up the FriiSpray equipment for the start of the event and encouraged people to try it out for themselves. There were still a number of IR interference issues in the space [we think it's due to the large amount of other projectors / interactive whiteboards / tech gear in the room] so we had to place the install in a corner which was a bit of a shame.

FriiSpray then presented the work to the audience in one of the scheduled ‘lightning presentations’. A very interesting presentation format – 20 slides of 15 seconds each, automatically timed. This keeps the presentations quick and snappy whilst allowing for a large number of speakers all in quick succession. A very efficient way of sharing information and finding out about what other people are up to.

Feedback on the install was positive with many impressed with the responsiveness of the drawing. We are in the process of making relevant Flickr content + groups.. will update later.

We met some great people at the event and would like to say a big thank you to the organisers – Craig Smith and Imran Ali. We are looking forward to following up the interest people showed and developing the project further.