Sunday, 7 October 2012

Botanicus Interacticus won the Ubimedia Award


The Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award (NUMA) Winner Workshop and NUMA Awards Ceremony were important events of MindTrek 2012

During the 3-hour workshop the best-ranked ubimedia masterpieces - the finalists and projects awarded with honorable mentions were introduced. The audience could see how the winners actually work and how they were made.

Numa Chairs Ville Luotonen and Artur Lugmayr together with Honorary Chair
Tim Merritt  handed out the prices. Other NUMA core team members are
Jury Chair Björn Stockleben and  Chair Cai Melakoski
photo ©MindTrek
The winners
The first price (€3000) went to
Botanicus Interacticus - Disney Research, Pittsburgh
Jonas Loh installing the plant before introducing Botanicus Interacticus
at the workshop

Ever thought interactive devices could be simply grown in the future? If not, maybe the interactive plant interface, Botanicus Interacticus, will make you reconsider. Using multi-frequency electrical pulses, this technology is capable of sensing the location and intensity of touching on any kind of plant (size permitting). This establishes a surprisingly powerful interface between the organic and the digital world and allows for a literally natural integration of media into the environment. This groundbreaking approach broadens the scope of ubimedia in an exciting way.

The second price (€2000) went to
Oh Music, Where Art Thou? - User System Interaction Programme, Eindhoven University of Technology

Matthijs Zwinderman introduced the OMWAT

Lost in a strange place in an unfamiliar city? This ambient audio navigation service is an innovative ready-to-market solution that relieves you from exposing your expensive phone and enables you to move about like a native. You will enjoy having your eyes free for looking around or interacting with friends, while a clever manipulation of stereo channels leads you the way using your favourite music. Mobile devices make services available virtually anywhere, but still tend to distract us from our surroundings. The jury values that the solution solves this dilemma in a simple and elegant way.

The third price (€1000) was won by
Joggobot - Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University Melbourne

The NUMA workshop was interactive. On left Wouter Walmink from
Joggobot with TAMK media students Yonathan Wolowelsky
simulating the Jogger and Joel Forsman the Robot

There are numerous new popular running applications for mobile devices, but even the best of them cannot replace the motivation caused by the physical presence of a running mate. The flying running companion Joggobot comes surprisingly close to a social running experience. This project shows the potential of ubimedia when it actually manifests in the playful behavior of physical objects instead of being rendered onto small screens.

The honorable mentions 
Honorable mentions were given to:
Nimesha Ranasinghe and the taste synthesizer

 “Digital taste synthesizer” by the CUTE-Center of National University of Singapore
is according to the jury a visionary project aiming to conquer the sense of taste for ubimedia.
Floating About

“Floating about” by Hochschule Darmstadt, a social location-based game that uses mobile projection devices to render an alternate reality directly on objects in the environment.
|||
Interactive Shadows was made by our Media students Amir Abdi & Johanna Peltola
and TAMK Business Informations Systems student Siru-Kristiina Kuivanen

TAMK Media Programme is one of the key organisers of NUMA. This year our students also participated in the competition itself with two projects. We are very proud of our students - although they didn't win a price in this tough competition their Demola project "Interactive Shadows" was selected to the short list and became thus one of the projects the NUMA jury considered worth a price.

About NUMA
The Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards is an annual competition with a total prize sum of 6.000 euros in 2012. Numa is open to all kinds of artists, practitioners and researchers. The competition was part of the international MindTrek 2012 conference held for the 16th time in Tampere, Finland during October 3rd – 5th.

The competition is organized collaboratively by MindTrek ry, Tampere Region Centre of Expertise in Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment & Media Management Lab. (EMMi Lab.) of Tampere University of Technology, Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Nokia Oyj and the Ambient Media Association (AMEA). The competition is funded by Nokia Oyj and the Tampere Region Centre of Expertise in Ubiquitous Computing.

www.mindtrek.org
www.numa.fi
Read more about the ubimedia competition on our blog
|||
About MindTrek 2012 on our blog:

|||

Posted by , , ,
Edit This Post