Open Lab Hours: Summary 19.02., 04.03., 11.03.2016with Nico Reski & Romain Herault

This is a short, informal andstraight-forward round-up of theOpen Lab Hours hosted by theDepartment of Media Technologyat Linnaeus University on 19.02.,04.03 and 11.03.2016, informingabout the latest happenings.

First of all, we were glad towelcome a couple of non-MediaTechnology students, who joinedout of curiosity after seeing theposters distributed in the D- build-ing. Having an interesting dialogwith these students, we presentedsome Virtual and Augmented Re-ality demos as well as talking gen-erally about these technologiesand various use cases, e.g., howto utilize AR and VR and in theclassroom.

Janosch and Romain are cur-rently investigating iBeacons1.

1https://developer.apple.com/

ibeacon/

They developed an iOS applica-tion that sends data about de-tected iBeacons via WebSocket2

to a server for further monitor-ing. Now, they are examiningsolutions on how to visualize thisdata in a meaningful way.

Furthermore, the Open LabHours seem to be a good oppor-tunity to get in contact with yoursupervisors. Bachelor students,who are currently working on theirfinal thesis projects, are often join-ing. We are observing with enthu-

2http://www.websocket.org

siasm the weekly progress theymade, supporting them with mean-ingful advice towards, design, im-plementation as well as conduct-ing user studies. One bachelorstudent was even able to run afirst small pilot study with thedeveloped prototype, investigat-ing different approaches on howto teach game mechanics in a 2Dplatform game.

Sci-Hub3, an online repositoryto access scientific publications,

3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Sci-Hub

1

is lately in the community’s spot-light. That was also a reason forus to engage in a conversation ab-out the current situation of pub-lishing academic papers we arestuck in. If you are not familiarwith these current on-goings, werecommend that you take someminutes and read up on it.

So far we are quite satisfiedwith the Open Lab Hours activity.We were always joined by enthu-siastic individuals, talking andbrainstorming about the most dif-ferent approaches and opportu-nities in human-computer inter-action as well as tools for soft-ware (and hardware) prototyping.Common tools that we are usingright now include Unity4, open-Frameworks5 and p5.js6. But alsoframeworks such as Processing7,Cinder8, D3.js9, Three.js10 or Ga-meMaker11 might suit your re-quirements to implement an idea,depending on your specific needs.

We hope you got an impres-sion of the latest activities. Aswe covered different topics andhad meaningful and productivediscussions, we look forward tocontinue doing so during the nextOpen Lab Hours sessions. Pleasehead over to our website to find(and subscribe) to our schedule.

All creatures welcome.

Find more information online, atbit.ly/OpenLabHoursLNU.

Twitter: @MediaTechLNUInstagram: @MediaTechLNU

4https://unity3d.com5http://openframeworks.cc6http://p5js.org7https://processing.org8https://libcinder.org9https://d3js.org

10http://threejs.org11https://www.yoyogames.com/

gamemaker

2