On Wednesday (28.09.2011) at 1 p.m. took place ‘Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards 2011’ workshop where three nominated projects were presented through their representatives. All interested students gathered in New Factory. The Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards 2011 is an international competition arranged by MindTrek, Nokia, Tampere Region Centre of Expertise in Ubiquitous Computing, TAMK University of Applied Sciences, AMEA – Ambient Media Association and New Ambient Multimedia Group (NAMU) / Tampere University of Technology. The total award sum for this competition category is 6 000€.

After short introduction made by Bjorn Stockleben (head of Jury) and Prof. Dr. Artur Lugmayr (the inventor of the Competition and General Competition Chair) was time for the first presentation made by Wilken Holle. ‘CUBODO’ was invented in Germany (Bremen) by three students as part of their master thesis. It is a casual location-based service to explore the word around and connect with players globally mostly via iPhone application (for now). This game is about virtual boxes with photographs made during the travel, dropped in one of visited places and discovered by somebody else. Through this application you can discover who was in the same place before you and what photo he/she made.

Second presentation was made by Kening Zhu who came to us from Singapore. The project name is ‘Selective Inductive Powering System for Paper Computing’. In simply way can be say that this interesting presentation was about new paper-computing system. Paper containing this system is very flexible (almost like traditional paper) and does not need power supply. You can send message to this paper and it will appear as burnt letters. Kening said ‘the novelty of this method lies in the power receivers in the context of wireless power transferring with multiple receivers’. Everyone was surprised what paper can do.

 The third project was named ‘Junkyard Jumbotron’. There were nobody from their team but we could watch short video about their project and applied it to our devices to see how it works. The ‘Junkyard Jumbotron’ is a web tool that makes very easy to combine a bunch of random displays into a single, large virtual display. It works! We could do it!

On this workshop we could learn about prototypes and applications before presenting them to the wider audience. Those three projects made big impression and encouraged us to work harder on our own projects.