The real and virtual worlds collide in the guise of strange sea creatures in Tentacles, a new iPhone application developed by a Toronto-based team.
The app, which debuted at this year’s Nuit Blanche, was co-developed by the York University Mobile Media Lab, the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab (CFC) and the Ontario College of Art & Design Mobile Lab.
“It was a very interdisciplinary, inter-institutional effort,” says Sarah Scarbrough-Wilner, a team member from York.
The project spawned from a request that Apple Canada posed: How would Apple technology be used to further educational interaction?
“(We said), ‘We’d like to use the existing technology and think of it more in terms of recasting it as a completely new device,’” recalls Scarbrough-Wilner.
The result: An interactive experience that turns the iPhone/iPod touch devices into mobile game controllers. Tentacles, which can be downloaded from the Apps Store, allows each user to control a squid-like creature via the device’s touch-screen interface.
Because the team wanted to bring people together, they introduced the concept of a “third space.” Players who log-in together will have their individual creatures co-exist and interact in the same oceanic environment, which can only be seen when projected onto an external, shared surface — at Nuit Blanche it was the side of a building at Ossington and Queen streets.
Adding yet another dimension are the short musical compositions that emit from players’ devices, with each new player contributing another sonic layer.
Visit www.tentacles.ca.
At Nuit Blanche
A VIP sneak preview prior to Nuit Blanche saw “20 or 30 people in the street at a time just playing together” and even attracted many walk-by visitors, says Rob King of the CFC and one of the project’s team leaders.
