Curated by Cybersonica the Virtually Real show showcases interactive artworks, technology showcases and demonstrations. Alongside Soda will be Squid Soup, The Sancho Plan, VisionLabz, Kinetica Museum, Monome (i want one, please!), MOTH, SHOWStudio, Jason Bruges, Lichtfaktor etc etc Check iDesign09 for more info. Tweet #idesign09 and Flickr tag relevant images idesign09 Come and say hi to Fiddian if your coming along.

Amnesty’s pledge has received close to 70,000 signatures exceeding our original expectations by far and the “censored fragments” have become wide spread through the internet receiving millions of views every month.

And we are delighted to see the irrepressible.info API being put to good use on Facebook. Add the irrepressible.info app to your Facebook profile now and help spread the word!

The launch video content for ‘Wave’ reflects the Ilac’s environment and much of it was produced with Dublin school children. In the next phase we hope to use some of Soda’s skills and experience with computer vision generative art software to enable the Ilac’s audience to interact in real time with the screen.

Soda also produced custom playout and administration software that enables control of the screens content over the internet.  Technographic did a fantastic job, as ever, with the screen’s production and it has been a real pleasure working with the Ilac’s architects Benoy.

The site has seen tremendous growth in the last few months and ranked amongst the 5,000 most popular web sites worldwide (source: alexa.com). Irrepressible.info’s database of censored material has been accessed globally more than 39,000,000 times through it’s supporting blogs and websites (new feature). Crucially the campaigns’ popularity has led to more than 50,000 people signing the pledge, greatly exceeding the original goal of 30,000 signatories. 

With the new API (Application programming interface) Soda gives developers the means to build their own applications that can access and use Amnesty’s extensive database of censored material. The incredibly successful banner system is just such an application, allowing web site owners to re-publish censored material on their own sites. While the banners raised awareness and made irrepressible.info such a success, they have certain limitations which the API can help overcome. Irrepressible.info is for example currently not compatible with the hugely popular myspace.com, thus missing out on the opportunity for the millions of myspace users to show their support. The banners are also not very immune to censorship themselves, something that could be greatly improved by the use of the API to create custom plug-ins for common blogging platforms and systems.

There is of course plenty of room for creative play with these new tools and we will be delighted to showcase whatever applications you devise to help spread the word! So if you are a developer check out the new API and see if it inspires you to help make irrepressible.info even more accessible to even more people! 

The PDF file here is the latest version of this and we are now using this with clients. However, we welcome further comment and input as we will continue to review our processes.

Download Soda’s Iterative design and development process Aug 2006.pdf.

The update coincides with an Amnesty report about the role of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google in internet repression in China. The report can be downloaded from irrepressible.info or Amnesty (see press release).

Please keep up the amazing support for this campaign so that we can keep making it even better! Also your feedback is much appreciated and will help shape the next phase of irrepressible.info.

Soda’s previous collaboration with Futurelab has recently been launched as a commercial product in partnership with Harcourt at www.moovl.co.uk.

The mobot is designed to be dressed or modified by the children. In a very quick exercise to test this approach they applied characterisations to it. Amongst other things they imagined and tested transforming the mobot’s persona to: Kitty, Phoenix, Tree, Monster-X Car, Alien and Super Robot

The children said they would also like it to: drive itself, nod, have hands that can grab and hold to “help you fetch pencils and things”, be taller, talk, shake and vibrate, have a water fountain, be covered with lights, have a camera and screen and to respond and be interactive, maybe to voice commands. Some, sadly not all, of these activities will be enabled by the next build iteration.

Soda is really pleased with the way this project is evolving, there appears to be a current revival of interest in social robotics which Shapla’s mobot taps into. We are also taking a very iterative approach to the development of the Mobot and hope for it to be very modular and flexible and so have a life far beyond what we do with it at the school.