Spark's Pop Up Play
Thu, 26 Feb 2015
Today I attended the launch of the Spark Pop Up Play "mixed reality digital play" platform. This exciting project is the result of a one-year collaboration between The Spark Arts, researchers at De Montfort University and technology company Dotlib and was supported with funding from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.
The platform is based around a computer system that allows children and educations to create rich multimedia environments and then interact with them via a tracking system that places the user literally in the centre of the action.
During the launch I had plenty of opportunities to play with it and I was very impressed. It was fun and intuitive to use and clearly had the potential to be a powerful learning tool. My favourite environment was probably the pirate ship - partly because I got to wear a tricorn hat whilst interacting with it :-)
The platform is written in Max and the patches are being released as open source. The software and documentation can be downloaded from the Spark website at http://thesparkarts.co.uk/popupplay/. It's free to download and well worth a look.
