Week 260

This was the first week after my hol­i­day so I spent Mon­day most­ly just get­ting back into things. A process that used to be quite painful but ever since we most­ly run on a com­bi­na­tion of Asana and Slack it is much eas­i­er to get a sense of what has hap­pened and what needs to be done com­pared to the old email days.

My post-hol­i­day blues were soft­ened by the com­pa­ny of Tom, who had been in the coun­try for a few days. As always, it was a plea­sure catch­ing up, see­ing what he’s been work­ing on and shar­ing our own work. We wrapped up with lunch at De Klub, after which Tom went on to explore Utrecht before his flight back to London.

The rest of the week I focused on Cam­parc. On Tues­day I had a week­ly sta­tus update call with STRP after which I drove down to Aldo’s stu­dio in Rot­ter­dam. There I had the great plea­sure to play with the pro­to­type cam­era ball he’s been build­ing. See­ing it live for the first time made a big impres­sion. The ball is seri­ous­ly big and unex­pect­ed­ly heavy. Watch­ing the gyro inside of it move around as you play with the ball is mes­meris­ing. See­ing the panoram­ic footage stream live as you move around is a bit mag­i­cal. For me it was def­i­nite con­fir­ma­tion we are on the right track.

Dur­ing the rest of the week I delved into all aspects of Cam­par­c’s pro­duc­tion, as there are quite a few things that remained to be deter­mined and arranged. Most notably I had a meet­ing with Tru­do, who are the devel­op­ers of Strijp‑S, which is the area where Cam­parc will be played. I shared our work in progress, got enthu­si­as­tic respons­es and we imme­di­ate­ly set out to sketch out the exact loca­tions where we will be play­ing on the week­end of the event the game is part of (Sep­tem­ber 12–14).

On Fri­day, I reviewed our progress with Aldo and made plans for the next week in which every­thing will come togeth­er for the beta ver­sion of the cam­era ball, includ­ing cus­tom, bright­ly coloured 3D print­ed con­nect­ing mate­ri­als. I also went over the cur­rent state of affairs with STRP again, pin­ning down some details of the even­t’s time table.

Aside from Cam­parc, I put some prepa­ra­tions into our upcom­ing project with KLM, and a grant appli­ca­tion for a new col­lab­o­ra­tion relat­ed to urban plan­ning. I closed the week off in style with Fri­day drinks and very nice din­ner at De Klub.