Mobile multi-player game prototype made for Nokia N97 touch interface. It was created during the Rapid Mobile Prototyping workshop at the Media Lab Helsinki. The prototype was made with Python for S60.

The goal of the game is to win a snowfight against the other player. You move the character by tilting the phone. You create a snowball by rubbing the right side of the screen and throw it by swiping the screen with your left thumb. The phones are connected via wi-fi and a server, so it’s a bit tricky to distribute the proto. Anyway it was a nice experiment in the world of mobile multi-player games.

The team: Juha Törönen and me.

Powderlove is a social online service for active downhill skiers and snowboarders. I came up with the original idea and then we made the service with a small team. The idea is to provide a place for snow enthusiasts to keep track of snowdays and to exchange experiences and stories with others. The site was launched in October 2009.

The first season was a quite nice success, but there is still things to improve. The team received a small fund from AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture) for developing the service. We are coming out with a new and polished Powderlove for the winter 2010/2011. We will also launch the service internationally (it’s only in Finnish at the moment).

The team: Juha Vaaraniemi, Anssi Väisänen and me. Credits also for Linda Söderholm for great character design.

http://www.powderlove.com

News Stumbler was an experimental visualization and an exploration of news topics and articles. It was the end result of the Dynamic Visualization Design seminar at the Media Lab Helsinki, Aalto University of Art and Design. It uses the metaphora of an ant colony where the ants are us the media hungry people, ants’ food is the news we consume and the ant trails are the connections between news topics we stumble upon.

The data consists of news topics and articles related to the initial search word. The related topics are fetched from Google search and the articles are from Google News. The results are scattered around the screen according to their relevance to the main topic.

After an ant finds a topic the topic and the ant will be colored according to which main path the topic belongs to. The more stronger ant path, the more news relate to the search word.

The team: Jonathan Cremieux and me.

Simple site design for a music maker who makes music for Pikku Kakkonen (tv-show for kids).

http://www.busterminglemusic.com