We attended the Smart Building Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. There I held a little talk on game design and gamification in the TRIBE project and energy efficiency in buildings in general. A short visit, just like the previous one in this project, but at least I had the opportunity to travel there a day earlier and meet up with an old friend who lives there. Good times, drinks and food were had.

We went for a final meeting with all of the partners hosted by our French colleagues at BIO by Deloitte. Generally a good meeting, although we all feel that we would have loved to do more with the project. It’s the good old issue of “if we had only known what we know now at the start”, but all in all I’m happy with what I have contributed with.

Recently did a new push of the TRIBE 2020 app. The Appstore version is pending for review but the Play version is available here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tii.tribe2020

I attended the World Sustainable Energy Days in Wels, Austria this week. My purpose was to talk a bit about the TRIBE poject which I have been working in with game design and general development for the past two years. I have never been to Wels before, it’s a fairly small town with a bit over 60K inhabitants and no international airport. I stayed at Bildungshaus Schloss in Puchberg which is an old castle repuposed as a conference venue just outside town.

I couldn’t make it in time on the same day which I was supposed to present, so instead I arrived a day early and spent some time checking out the rest of the conference. I’m not really an enegy expert, though I of course find the subject interesting. I would probably not have attended it if I wasn’t a speaker. The veune where we presented was an an old church, repurposed as Muesum and then again repurposed as a conference hall (a recurring theme throughout Austrian towns I was told by a native colleague).

We got the tinies space, a small praying room in a corridor next to the mass hall or something. It was very pretty though, and the intereset was really big so people filled up the tiny room and more sat just outside the enterence peeking in. I was surprised to learn that the visitors were unaware of the concept of gamification and knew very little of game design. I managed to keep a fair group of people there well after our session was over, even though I frequently told them that the session was over and they needn’t stay if they didn’t want to, until it was ten mintues till they would lock the building.

All in all, it was a fun conference to present at, and it’s appearantly a fairly reknown one having been held for 20 years now, but I would probably not have attended if it wasn’t for the TRIBE project. I learned that Mozart was born in Salzburg (neighbouring town where I landed with the airplane) and as such “Mozart Balls” (which are also popular in Sweden) originated there as a result. I also got to speak to a lovely lady from Mexico who presented a composite from sugar can ashes and some other rest product which could be used for house construction. Good stuff!

WSED Webpage on the subject

Here is a work in progress video of the TRIBE game.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to Wels in Austria to present the game and work done within the project on the World Systainable Energy Days conference. Hopefully it will be intersting and productive. : )

I have been working on this behaviour change game for energy efficiency in public spaces for some time now on my day job. It’s probably about time that I post it here on ztinker. So the basic idea is to mix a simplified energy simulation (simplified in order to be real-time) and mix it with a person and activity simulation ala The Sims. The result is a fairly interesting game and simulation platform that could fit as an edutainment tool as well a building energy monitor system (BEMS).

The app is up for public testing on Google Play and there is a form to become a tester on TestFlight:
tribe2020.eu

We recently got some reinforcement working on implementing the environments and it really shows. I built the game to a phone so that I could see how well it would perform and I must say that it looks pretty sweet, graphically. Looking forward to where this will lead.

So I’m back from our first, proper pilot visit. These visits aim to let representatives give guided tours of the buildings that are supposed to be implemented in the game. In Zaragoza we have four pilots, San Pablo (main offices of the city development), Emmeline de Pankhurst (social housing complex), CIRCE head quarters (main offices of the research partner CIRCE) and Azucarera (an elementary school).

The visits were fun, I shot a lot of pictures and videos and asked questions where I saw fit. It must be said that I’m still not sure exactly how this reference material is going to be used, but I suppose it’s best to record the environments as well as I can.

However, my strongest impression of this trip did not come from the pilots but a vending machine. A hamburger, cooking machine situated outdoors. Obviously I had to try it… but I can only comment that I was not very impressed. Didn’t finish the burger. The mushroom tapas in a “hidden” alley where great though. : )