PICNIC Academy 1 - Tuesday

The PICNIC Academy offered students from different universities and schools a world class series of lectures by PICNIC speakers.

9.00-9.30 WELCOME
Monique van Dusseldorp, Programme Director PICNIC07

9.30-10.00 PICNIC at Heart
Why is important to bring together the worlds of research, marketing, media and technology? Bas Verhart, co-founder of PICNIC and CEO of Mediarepublic, tells his story.
Bas Verhart, Co-Founder PICNIC and CEO Mediarepublic

10.00-11.00 FRANK BOYD, INTERACTIVE PROJECTS
Frank Boyd has been involved with many of the most innovative new media projects developed in the UK. In this presentation he presents some of the best projects and discusses the development.

Frank Boyd is a specialist in creativity and innovation especially in the field of new media. He has been Director of the European Multimedia Labs, an occasional series of development workshops, since 1995. The Labs have supported the creation of new for some of the most talented new media creatives in Europe. Boyd worked for BBC’s Learning and Innovation Division for 5 years as Director of Creative Development where he managed a series of workshops for producers in and new media to create new ideas for TV, radio, broadband and interactive television.

11.00-11.30 BREAK

11.30-12.15 DENNIS CROWLEY, SOCIAL MOBILE APPLICATIONS
Location technologies bridge the real world and the virtual. Social mobile applications use location and proximity on networked devices to tap into the real world: building new relationships, fostering existing ones, or just having fun.

Dennis Crowley is the founder of dodgeball.com, a New York based service that focuses on merging location-based services with social networks to help people connect with the people and places around them. Dodgeball was acquired by Google in 2005. Dennis has developed and managed mobile applications for Vindigo and MTV Networks and has been involved in the creation of Big Games such as PacManhattan and ConQwest(tm). He was named one of the "Top 35 Innovators Under 35" by MIT's Technology Review magazine (2005).

12.15-13.00 JULIAN BLEECKER, WHEN 1ST LIFE MEETS SECOND LIFE
With all the exuberance surrounding online digital worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, to name but two, what is happening to our normal, human 1st Life world? Is there a responsible, reasonable alternative to inhabiting 2nd Lives as much as we do? An alternative that knits together 1st Life and 2nd Life in a meaningful, habitable and playful fashion?

Julian Bleecker heads the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, a near-future think tank and research and development lab at the School of Cinema-TV and the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Bleecker is an expert technologist with over 20 years of hands-on experience.

13.00-14.00 LUNCH

14.00-14.15 GENERATION NEXT
Marcel van der Heijden presents his network of 700 students in the field of interactive media.

14.15-14.50 ADRIAN HON, ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES
Part game, story and treasure hunt, alternate reality games introduce people to a world of creative play, skywriting, online games, phone calls, radio broadcasts, secret websites, blogs, texts, coded adverts, emails, hidden audio files and helicopter chases. What you need to know about what's been happening and what's happening next from industry leaders.

Adrian Hon has been at the forefront of alternate reality gaming since its inception in 2001, when he co-moderated the groundbreaking online community Cloudmakers. Adrian’s interests range from gaming to storytelling to cross media entertainment. He was formerly the Executive Producer and Director of Play at Mind Candy, where I produced the Perplex City Alternate Reality Game.

15.00-15.30 BEN FRY – PROCESSING
What began as a domain-specific extension to Java targeted towards artists and designers has turned into a full-blown design and prototyping tool used for large scale installation work, motion graphics, and complex data visualization. Ben Fry, who created Processing along with Casey Reas, will demo Processing.

Ben Fry is a designer who is currently developing Processing, an environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software.

15.30-16.00 BREAK

16.00-17.00 MICHAEL B. JOHNSON, DIGITAL LEAD, PIXAR
Collaborating on research between creativity and innovation at Pixar has resulted in some of the world’s greatest animated feature films of the last decade. Michael Johnson he will offer insights into some of the programmes and applications developed by his team to enable the production of these award-winning features.

Michael Johnson is the man behind some of the most groundbreaking techniques of Pixar Animation Studios, having worked on feature films including Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille.