poke – Page 4 – DEATH TO THE FLIPPERS

Quick Draw Saloon

The Quick Draw Saloon at the last ever V&A Village Fete went down a storm, which had a lot to do with all the work that went it to making and running the thing by the guys and gals of Stuff Club (that, and the fact we were giving out shots of whiskey for 50p a go). I can gladly report that we were thoroughly badly behaved, and successfully encouraged others to do likewise. Some highlights include branding the word ‘LOSER’ over the face of a child, one of punters accidentally fall off the wagon after ten years of not touching a drop of the good stuff and comanding a baying mob to shout out obscene phrases until the wee hours while watching people try to draw naughty things (such as ‘syphilis‘).
Clicky here for more photos.

Quick Draw Saloon – opening night!

Tonight it’s the V&A Village Fete grand opening, and us lot at Stuff Club (which is a gang of do-ers at Poke) have built the Quick Draw Saloon. Come along tonight or tomorrow and pit your speed drawing skills against another pen slinger. There’s a prize for the winner, and something else for the looser.

TV’s Chris Boardman

Today, we at Poke bid a fond farewell to TV’s Chris Boardman. During his year break from uni here at Poke we have worked him to within an inch of his life. Which is of course how all student placements should be handled. He’s heading back up north to finish his learnings (see: slacking). We dearly hope he graces our door again, so we can work him even harder. He’s responsible for the speedy development of the interactive map we created for the Design Museum and various other behind the scenes development breakthroughs. We put together this video installation down in the mess hall to honour the chap. See you soon Boarders!

Asploding Digital Design

The Design Museum is running an exhibition called Super Contemporary, it’s about the history of design in London. They kindly asked us geeks at Poke to make a map charting the history of the digital design scene from 1994 to today. So we made this map thingy in flash that you control with a proper real world knob that sits patiently under the big old plasma screen in the exhibit. The knob magic is achieved with some help from an Arduino.

Gathering all the data was not exactly simple, we needed to know staff numbers for most of the digital agencies in London (sorry, we couldn’t include them all) for each quarter of each year for 13 years, and a lot of them don’t exist anymore. A lot of favours were pulled, and many painful wounds re-opened. We thought about being respectful about when each company died during the bubble burst… but then thought ‘sod it’ and made them TOTALLY ASPLODE!!!1 instead.

Of course when I say ‘we’ did it, what I really mean is me n Jas designed it and animated some bits, the hard stuff was done by TV’s Chris Boardman. The data gatherer was The Hoss and Mr Zolty was the knob guy.

Here’s some photos of it being installed, and some mild panic of getting the damn thing working.

The Sound of Orange RockCorps

I made a little video thingy. It sits on the side of a taxi cab which is actually a mobile photo booth/sound recorder for something called The Sound of Orange Rockcorps. What these photos and sounds are going to be used for is ~~a bit secret, and we’re still working on it~~ a surprise!

There’s more information on the Orange RockCorps blog.

Oasis: NEWS SPLASH!

Us chaps at Poke have launched the third augmented reality game for Rubberduckzilla. This time we partnered with The Sun, and what jolly fine people they were to work with too (cheers Mike!). The AR marker was printed in a double page spread all about Rubberduckzilla. Punters the bought The Sun simply had to visit www.rubberduckzilla.com hold the paper up to their webcam and all hell broke lose. You can also play News Splash by printing out the AR marker from the site. Here’s a quick video I shot to demonstrate what happens for those poor people that don’t have a webcam.

Oasis: MASSIVE AQUA RAMPAGE!

Just finished this site for Oasis. If you have a webcam, you can turn yourself into a giant rubber laser blasting duck and blast the crap out of the city! Just print out this marker, hold it on your head and hit spacebar to start the burninating! Developed by the amazing code monkeys at LingoBee. More games coming soon to www.RUBBERDUCKZILLA.com

BakerTweet

Yey! We made a thing! Well, when I say ‘we’ I mean Poke, and when I say Poke I mean ‘mainly Zolty and Mattias‘, but we helped out, we even screwed the thing to the wall. Anyway, it’s a lovely device that hangs on the wall of the baker’s kitchen across the road from Poke, when something fresh comes out of the oven they just turn a dial to select what kind of fresh thing it it, press a button, and hey presto a tweet is sent out to hungry new media professionals int he Shoreditch area. It’s all made possible with the lovely Arduino.

We tried to keep it under wraps a bit but it kinda slipped out into the twitter land and news spread like hot cakes (pun very much intended), so we rushed together this promo video in about 2 hours. What’s super sweet is somebody over at Hidden Chemistry has already extended the idea with a bit of a hack – nice!

We’ve had great support from the people over at the Albion (our first test subject) who are chuffed to bits with thier new toy. It’s not many swanky, brand new, Conran designed cafes that let a bunch of geeks screw something weird onto one of their shiny tiled walls.

Get the full skinny at BakerTweet.com

Here’s some pics of the thing being installed.

Formula Onederland

So, some of us guys and gals at Poke have started up a little club we call ‘Stuff Club’, in which we make stuff, y’know – for fun. The first thing we’ve made was actually a request by the Poke elders to do some kind of alternate Christmas tree for the office. So, naturally, we built a 8 foot square Alpine village (known as the Black Forest Ghetto) featuring a totally sweet Scalextric set with tunnels, bridges, mountains and sound reactive lights in all the trees and lil’ houses (they react to the music thats pumped out of the amp and speakers hidden in the base unit). Mattias even built a working lap timing system that plugged into a website Nicky designed, but we ran out of time to install it.

It stayed up for about 3 weeks and didn’t burst into flames once! Something we’re all slightly amazed about. A massive thank you with bells on to everyone who helped out.

~>> Here’re pics of the finished thing <<~

~>> Here’re the production pics <<~

Spooky Shitter

Well this blog post is really really late, but anyway: This Halloween, we didn’t do a party, but we did haunt the toilets at Poke. A 3 day residency in the toilet at work is a strange thing to do, and a bit tricky to pull off in (nearly) complete secrecy, with a different theme each day – but it worked a treat, and we got a few screams. Here’s some photos.

DAY ONE: ZOMBIE ATTACK

DAY TWO: VOODOO/SATANIC

DAY THREE: EDGAR ALLAN POE