All about me and my super crazy interweb antics

Hello, you have found the blog and online portfolio of Christian 'Cookie' Cook, a final year Digital Art & Technology student from the University of Plymouth. On this site you will find the various ramblings and progressions of his studies in the digital world. Heavily influenced by the gaming industry, he aims to incorporate game into every day life; because life should be fun.

If you wish to contact Christian, you can find him on such sites as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or alternatively you can send him a traditional email if you fancy.

POSTED 27.03.2012 @ 11:20

Urbungle

This is the final result of the Everyware module, named ‘Urbungle’. We formed the name by literally merging the two words Urban and Jungle, simple yet explanative! There are two outcomes of the project, on the iPhone we have the Urbungle Compass which I have explained in thorough detail in previous blog posts. In a nutshell it is a navigational application which guides you through the urban jungle, rediscovering new places in your area. It feeds off the immaterial foursquare layer around us, providing the application with venues and digital intensity; represented by a dynamic audio track. It is currently [...] (read more…)

POSTED 26.03.2012 @ 11:19

Flashy Compass

Ok, take 4 of developing the Urban Jungle Compass. What you see here is the first prototype of the compass in action. This is a screenshot taken from my iPhone after I had managed to get the geolocative data out from the phone and displayed on screen, which means I can practically do anything now! Well, sort of. Flash also supports Android exporting, but it seems the Android exporter is a bit behind compared to the iOS one. Once again… it is not possible to get the bearing out from the sensors! It allows me to get the latitude and [...] (read more…)

POSTED 22.03.2012 @ 13:21

Dev… dev and more dev

So during development so far, the programming has hit several, SEVERAL dead ends. To save on development time we wanted to use the existing code from “That Way” and expand upon it. We also wanted to expand the project to work on multiple platforms, being able to hit Android and possibly more. After doing a small part of research I found out about Phonegap during a module for a different lecture, which allows you to deploy rich HTML5 web-apps as native apps to all of the different smartphone platforms. This was too good an opportunity to miss out so I [...] (read more…)

POSTED 05.03.2012 @ 13:17

Shifty Shifty

Our lecturer disliked our ideas of mapping altitude. I agree entirely that it missed the concepts of tapping into the city’s digital layer, and we couldn’t do much with it. So lets look at a key point within the brief: “Through different location based technologies, we create a data sphere for the Internet that offers up new possibilities to locate or ‘attach’ the digital to objects, space and people.” Altitude isn’t really anything new, and if we were to use it we should couple it with the latitude and longitude. We need to bring in data from the invisible digital [...] (read more…)

POSTED 01.03.2012 @ 12:13

Everyware final(ly) Project

For the final project of Everyware we have decided to merge groups from previous projects together to create a massive combination of technologies and ideas. Previously I worked with Gavin on “That Way”, and we want to take the initial idea of the directional compass into a new area, fitting with the Digital City brief. New to the group is Paul, who worked on a project involving geo-locative audio in Devonport. Together we wish to mash up our previous ideas into something exciting and fresh. After an initial meeting with our tutor, he pointed us towards the initial direction of [...] (read more…)

POSTED 28.02.2012 @ 16:45

Compasstruction

The breakdown of the “That Way” project boils down to two elements; the Compass and the Visualisation. Easily enough, there are two members in my group who are programmers and we split up the work rather evenly. The job at hand is a code-intensive environment so I felt right at home working like this. My focus was to build the Compass and get it available to work on mobile devices. The latest rage these days is HTML5, which is a mixture of basic HTML and JavaScript. Because of its nature it is very easy to break down the components of [...] (read more…)

POSTED 21.01.2012 @ 12:48

Mixing the Material & Immaterial

So far we have come to an agreement, Devonport needs to be rediscovered. Not only by the residents, but by outsiders too; including me. I have only been to Devonport once or twice, both times for the purposes of this project. Usually I am really good navigating myself around an unknown foreign space, but I really struggled to find my bearings this time. Looking at maps has no uses, pathways which were once there have disappeared since or are cordoned off by construction sites; something needs to be done. Our concept is essentially a re-imagining of the “Marauders Map” from [...] (read more…)

POSTED 20.01.2012 @ 12:29

Devonport: The Inbetween

From my previous blog post, I briefly mentioned the aiding in reconstruction of the Devonport community. Since then we have once again met up in our groups to discuss what problems the community currently faces, and went through picking apart the area plucking out keywords we found relevant. The physical structure and layout of Devonport has been forever changing. Once before it used to be its own town, but since the Blitz bombings in 1941 during World War II much of the area of Devonport had been practically wiped out. During the redevelopment phase which happened much much later private [...] (read more…)

POSTED 16.01.2012 @ 20:25

Digital Architecture: Material/Immaterial

It has revolved around to taking part in embedding the digital immaterial into physical material. Architecture and physical space is somewhere which I haven’t ventured to much in my studies, but have been presented with the perfect opportunity to dabble around. Presented with an area of Plymouth called Devonport, we have been presented with a pretty open brief on aiding the reconstruction of a community which has been deprived of attention for so long. All of the research activities in this module are group-work, and our lecturer has taken the task of mixing together students from the 2nd/3rd year of [...] (read more…)

POSTED 09.01.2012 @ 16:49

Smarter Parking for a Smarter Planet

Well, I will be honest. This idea had no time to incubate or develop over the Christmas holidays. Each member of the group had full plans over the Christmas holiday and didn’t get time to put any serious thought into the final outcome of this project. In some ways this is really good, especially for our group. Overanalysis is something commonly done which can detract an idea from its original roots. Having a short time period to work on an idea has allowed us to think up a very simple and intuitive idea which will change how we can live [...] (read more…)

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