Application

The main character in the Book App 'Bitterveld' travels with the Berlin S-Bahn and U-Bahn to different World War II memorials and observes fellow travelers. How are the observations and Wold War II connected? The major World War II events happened a long time ago, but are still relevant today.

The philosophical animal stories by famous Dutch author Toon Tellegen are brought to life in the app ‘A Distant Journey’. Now even the youngest can enjoy the story of the elephant, the squirrel and a mysterious tree. This interactive story is perfect for parents and teachers who want to spend some quality time with their children or want to hand them something interesting and thoughtful to do on their own.

With hand drawn illustrations by artist Gwen Stok, a compelling and heartfelt soundtrack by Half Way Station, lively animations and various interactions, this heartwarming story will keep children coming back again and again. Reading the story themselves or listen as the story is being told.

The free application Wolk allows library users to walk through a virtual poetry museum. The poems that are animated in augmented reality are particularly aimed at children and adolescents. The corresponding educational material for primary and secondary students provides leads to use the application in the classroom.

An interactive digital poem for smartphones. If the user blows on or moves the phone around, the words and the form of the poems change.

For the project 'Poetry on the mobile screen' initiated by the Dutch Foundation for Literature and Mondrian Foundation, poet Wim Brands and graphic designer Max Kisman made the iPad app ”IJsseloever”: Sixteen moments of the lives of two elderly women are hidden in the IJssel river valley. They watch the ships, read their names and in their minds they sail to foreign countries. The story also contains 15 video poems and one audio clip. The app is published by TYP/Three Publishers and is available from 17 May 2012 in the App Store for €1,59.

A printed map of the IJssel river valley will be published as well. When you point your smartphone at the markers on the map, you can watch the videos with the Junaio augmented reality browser (€2 excl. shipping).

Six different teams of poets and designers participated in 'Poetry on the mobile screen'. The final results will be presented on 17 May 2012 on 16 hours in the Trouw Building in Amsterdam.

A snowstorm of letters coming your way, forming words as they reach you. Thoughts with a short lifespan, generated in collaboration with the city. For a short moment, mainly in transit, you are visiting somebody else's head. 

'Lijn 3' is a poem that you can travel through when using tram line 3 in Amsterdam, traveling from the Concertgebouw in the direction of Zoutkeetsgracht. Lieke Marsman wrote the poem, International Silence created the setting. Sometimes the poem references the surroundings, other times it muses on other subjects.

“Doomscrolling” refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly—and in some cases, almost involuntarily—scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. Certainly the realities of the pandemic necessitate a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety. But doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. Yes, it may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, The Endless Doomscroller acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. By stripping away the specifics wrapped up in each headline and minimizing the mechanics behind most interface patterns, The Endless Doomscroller offers up an opportunity for mindfulness about how we’re spending our time online and about who most benefits from our late night scroll sessions. And, if one scrolls as endlessly as the work makes possible, The Endless Doomscroller might even enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what these interfaces want from and do to us. In other words, perhaps the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling.

(Source: Author's description)

VUMA Soner honours the voices, stories and talent of people of colour in Scandinavia. It is an app created by VUMA Projects with geo-triggered immersive audio experiences. This chapter of the app contains a collection of thoughts, reflections, and conversations, remembered or spontaneous, tied to specific landmarks, buildings and areas in the city of Bergen. The authors are all living in Bergen, some speaking in Norwegian and some in English. The sounds can be accessed in six central locations through a free downloadable app, which can be combined into one long, or multiple small walks. Production of the app is supported by the City of Bergen, the Arts Council of Norway and BEK.

How to access the appTo find the app, go to an app store (Google Play or App Store) on your mobile device. Search for “VUMA Soner” and download it for free. Create an account and select the walk. The audio experiences are linked to GPS locations and will be triggered when you walk into the zone of your selected walk. If your signal is weak in some areas, you can download the walks onto your device beforehand. Just be sure to keep the GPS on.

Field of Cures is a vibrant, thoughtful game that raises awareness of ethical issues in science, while also raising funds for science advocacy. It is designed as a casual puzzle game where you develop medicines by cross-breeding flowers and directing clinical-trial research. At the micro-level of gameplay, the player will learn how to manipulate a simple model of genetic inheritance to breed-specific species of medicinal plants. At the macro level, the player will have to choose between ethical and unethical research practices in conducting clinical trials to get new drugs to market. On a macro level, the player will face trade-offs between increasing profits, fostering public health, and protecting the natural biodiversity. Two NPC will give you two different progress advice. The NPC business advisor will urge the player to take such shortcuts in the name of expediency, while an NPC science advisor advocates instead for research integrity.

The player will discover different points of view in different scenarios that may develop empathy towards the game characters, and allowed the player to see the different outcomes of their choices and the consequences of those decisions affecting the game world, which fosters ethical thinking.

The game is pretty useful for both an educational purposed game and a persuasive game.

*Field of Cures is currently in an early stage of development, with the initial stages of the game available to play as a demo on a PC using a mouse.

The novel "Al-Barrah – The announcer" is a collaborative, immersive, and digital project between Reham Hosny and Mohamed A. Nasef. "Al-Barrah" is the first paper novel to combine augmented reality and hologram technologies with Arabic language text inside the borders of a paper page to provide the reader with a unique experience, and immerse her in the narrative.

The novel is divided into two parts, each part narrates a different story from the other part. The first story discusses the after Arab Spring situation in the Arab World and the second one imagines how the lost continent of Atlantis was destroyed in a day and night.  Each part can be read in the opposite direction of the other part so, the reader will flip the book upside down in order to read the other part, thus the novel can be read from both sides, and in a reverse way.

 The first story happens in contemporary times, while the second story goes back to ancient times, and the world of legends. The two stories converge in the middle of the book, and the reader will be able to create links between the two stories and understand their connotations.

The reader will download an AR application, designed especially for the novel of Al-Barrah, on her smart device, opens the application, and then directs the camera of the device above the image. The digital content starts to come out, which is written in Arabic, English, and in Heiroglyphic in some parts of the novel.

The hologram technology is used in the second story to project the light of a hologram video inside a plastic pyramid, which the reader will create by herself. The reader will watch the book of Osiris goes around inside the pyramid and some shapes like ancient statues and modern inventions get out of the book, here the reader gets the connotation of this scene and understands that the book of Osiris will tell her about the news of the ancient age and the future age. Al-Barrah has been featured and discussed in different conferences and symposiums around the world.