 Just a little bit about Mariah before she introduces herself in another way and the people that she's speaking with. Mariah is really one of the founders of the festival. She's been around since the beginning, and while her role has shifted throughout, she's definitely been in on the ground floor of our conversation. So I think it's important people know that just in terms of as they're getting to know who we are and as we're getting to know who you are, we're all spending so much time together. So, so happy that that's the case. I'm Sarah, and one of the things that we realized after a really terrific launch to the festival is choir, choir, choir, and a wonderful territorial acknowledgement is that in our rush to do a number of things, we've not put that as part of our practice in introducing the shows. And so I want to thank Angela actually for bringing that up yesterday and reminding us to think about that and the land that we're on. We're on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory here. It's unseated and we're here very much on the backs of colonial decisions, colonizing decisions that were made many, many years ago and trying to make the best guests that we can be. And so to say that we have forgotten to acknowledge that on a number of occasions is part of the work to say, wow, that's a history of my own colonized mind and I'm working on constantly to try to come to terms with. So really grateful that you raised it and also to be able to acknowledge the land that we stand on and to try to do a good work towards that reparation each day. So today's conversation is totally cashed. Those of you who've been here before, hope you're enjoying the breakfast. Hopefully people will be coming in and out. It is being live streamed so if the camera moves around, make sure that you're ready for your close-up. And yeah, these chats are an opportunity to have different ways into the conversation so today's about locating apps. And I think I don't need to say any more other than to turn it over to you. Hello. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you. That's great. Really great. I'm really happy to be sitting here with Andrew and Tristan. I know Tristan a little bit from his work with a company called Pop Sandbox. I wanted to give you to kind of give us cold notes on who you are, what kind of work you're doing, the work that you both do in Halifax in Toronto. So Tristan, go ahead. Sure. Hey everyone, I'm Tristan Ticklehaven. I work for a producer and do some creative direction for Pop Sandbox. We just created an app called On Foot which is self-guided location-based tours that you use a lot of interactive components. We can launch tours anywhere in the world. It kind of started as a haunted walk app and kind of moved into this larger platform. So by the end of the summer, hopefully we'll have launched six tours in Toronto and one tour in Tokyo. We use kind of audio stories with images to tell our stories and then you can discover more. So we offer image galleries. We'll offer VR photospheres to take you inside of buildings. We do augmented reality so we can put a ghost on the street in front of you for the haunted tours. And then, yeah, that's kind of our big project right now. We also do other interactive work, interactive documentaries with a few other things if you're interested somewhere on the workflow. You know, but our big project is called On Foot. I'm Andrew Burke. I'm a originally software developer from Halifax. And last year I worked on a project with Halifax's Zupa Theater called This Is Nowhere. And it was a multi-location theater production with lots of little hidden productions happening, all performances happening all around downtown. And you would use an app to sort of get clues and give you sort of a warm cold GPS kind of reading on where you were and you sort of scavenge your hunt to find these performances and when you got close enough it would sort of switch over and say, you know, find the person with a blue hat, show them your phone, and then you'd be in the middle of a performance possibly at a bar or in a library where nobody else there even knows if there's a show going on because it's just sort of in the space. And I built all the software. There's a lot of server-side management and making sure that sites don't get overloaded with too many people. We have registration and things like that. There's a content management system. And then I also built the mobile apps for that that help you get around. And we're pinning that off as its own sort of platform called Nowhere, Nowhere, to possibly apply to other kinds of projects that have location and performance and content. So very similar in some ways to what you're doing. But mostly text. We had slightly different focuses, I think. Ours is an assistant to a bigger picture production rather than a sandal and a thing where people go by themselves. So our focus was a bit different. Yeah, we're working, hopefully, fingers crossed. We're going to put some multiplayer stuff in the future. Multiplayer, what do you mean? Sinking up the info that other people around you keep on doing tours. And then maybe one day live performance stuff. We'll see it right now. It's just self-added toys. Cool. I have a few questions, but I want to open up, if anybody has any questions, thoughts that they have right off the bat for Andrew and Tristan. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, we've done a few, a little bit of work with a group called Lab of Misfits in London. They did a project called the Virginity Project where users were allowed to drop the story of the loss of their virginity near where they lost their virginity. Oh, man. And then the stories are triggered when you cross the GPS marker. But we had issues with the resolution of GPS for triggering. So if you have any strategies around that, maybe it's not for this discussion. No, no, I think it's, I think it's... Yeah, sure. Yeah, I have a lot of issues with GPS. I've also asked many people about how to fix it, and I've been told I need access to military satellites. Yeah. Oh, god. Really? Cross-extra, unfortunately. Yeah, it's very... Yeah, it's, our big thing became one, I mean, we have multiple haunted tours. We're trying to launch, and we were originally going to try and launch our tour around Young Street in Toronto, and we just realized you could be five blocks off on the GPS on where your location was, and we were using a software plugin for Unity called Mapbox, and we thought, oh, maybe Google Maps would be better, and we saw Google Maps was just as far off. It was just a GPS thing. So tricks are, you know, you can kind of play around with the settings so that it's not constantly checking and there's little things you can do like that. My biggest thing is just try and pick areas where the buildings aren't too tall, and try and base your stories around there. And there's also, the other thing we do is we, especially with our audio, we try and we work in our directions a little bit into the audio, so we're like, you know, head up this street and those kind of things. You can add in cues of that nature as well. Yeah, ours, we sort of early on realized that, you know, we, early on, the thought was, we'll have one of the locations would be this table and the other location would be that table. It's only like five meters away and that, there was no way. But we ended up setting up, all these different locations had kind of a radius of about 20 to 30 meters, depending on the, or maybe 100 sometimes. And so the, we always had a differentiation between looking for a place and then being at a place. And when you got to the place, it would then give you more specific instructions like, okay, look for the green door, stuff that you could at least be, you're close enough. You've maybe traveled several hundred meters or whatever to get there. And then you still got to be 30 meters, 40 meters to go. But by then you should be able to see where you need to go and then the crews would then give you that. But yeah, we found that was about as precise as we could get. And we were able to get maybe five meter resolution in areas where the building was tall. Yeah, and you can never, and everyone's phone is going to be different from the actual device, or the thing that people are going to be using. So that's always a bit of a challenge that every, it's like going, putting on a, putting on a play, but everyone's got a different theater. You know. Well, that's a good analogy. Yeah. Some of the theaters refused to run. Some of them refused to run. But we actually did try doing AR stuff for a little while early on for experiments. And there was a library called ARCL, which is a core location of augmented reality. And it was a perfect conceptual idea because we were trying to map things like virtual things into the real world in positions. But yeah, GPS shifts you 30 meters to the left. Or, you know, suddenly everything kind of falls apart. And you've seen the Pokemon go death counter. What is this? What's the Pokemon go death counter? Well, they shut it down. Okay. But there was a counter up on the line. It was counting the number of people who walked. Oh, died, crossed off. But there was, yeah, we can talk about attention as well. But that's, yeah, something else. I just want to ask a really naive question. So two thoughts, one is I want to know, thinking about Pokemon go because I know nothing about the technology, but Pokemon go, the sites are much closer together, I think. Right. And the other one is, last year at Folder, we saw a show called Ambrose. And it was, we went around the Grand Theater downtown. And I think those were triggered by beacons. Yeah, beacons. We did look like beacons. What is that? And how is that different? Cool. Yeah, sure, I'll start. Yeah, I mean, we've tried to play around Bluetooth beacons, which are almost like hot cold sensors, and you need to have your Bluetooth on in order to pick them up. The thing about them is that they're really just hot cold beacons, and they can send a small amount of data. We originally were hoping, like, oh, we could use this as a way to like stream assets into the app. But all it really does is trigger that this is the content that you need to grab from this place. But it does work for, if you want, I know stores use it sometimes to tell you if there's a deal on this t-shirt. It's much better for like, yeah, museums is another good place to use it like close proximity location. So that means in Ambrose, we just went around the one building. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the beacons are about this big, and you can just stick them somewhere, and if you're within a meter or two of it, it sort of beeps at your phone and says, oh, this is the beacon, they've got an ID, so then you can tie media to the beacon. And it's much more precise, but you've got to set them up, and you have to make sure that once again, everybody's devices can handle beacons, which is not always apparent to you once again. And for those of you who don't remember, they gave us devices. Wasn't our own devices? I think they were using our own phones. Yeah, they had a device that was like somehow connected to the beacons themselves. It wasn't like a UI or phone situation. You actually... Yeah, I think they gave us phones. Yeah. Our US was several hundred people per show, and we couldn't have several hundred phones to give away. So if you have a venue, you can control the devices and like have a Wi-Fi router. There's so much more you can do, whereas when you're trying to just do outdoor exploration with whoever, whatever random phones they have, there's a little bit more. One thing I should have mentioned before is we also use pictures of buildings. So if you're 30 meters off on your phone, you'll see a picture and be like, oh, that's the building. I know I've got to walk a couple blocks down, but I would try. What was your first question again? Oh, which one do you want to go with Pokemon Go? Oh, that was the remember. Yeah, well, Pokemon Go, the one thing about Pokemon Go, I'll say, is they're much less site-specific. So it doesn't really matter where the Pokemon is, as long as it triggers when you walk up. So I know they have some of those spinning coin things that are tied to certain parts and things like that, but in terms of when the Pokemon pop off at you, it's more about just walking and having your phone notify you as opposed to saying, oh, I'm in front of the scene. Finding this. They're not within like a three-meter radius. You're thinking about the sites, whatever they're called, stops or whatever. Yeah. They're tied to specifically. Yeah, those are, and I always find, Yeah, and the thing I'll say, especially about GPS, is like our points on the map are never off. They're always in the right spot on the map. It's where you are that's never correct. Yeah, exactly. That's interesting. Okay. Thank you for that. Okay. So Unity, you've both spoken about Unity. I don't know if this is, I'm, does everybody else know what Unity is, and I'm just the only one who has no idea what Unity is? I don't know. Tell us a little bit about Unity. You've both told us. I know of it. You're actually working it. Okay, yeah. I've worked with Unity a number of times. Unity is a great ever-expanding game platform. So you can build games and launch it to almost any platform. So it allows you to build a video game in Unity and then put it on Steam or put it on PS4 or put it on Android or iOS. And that presents its whole other group of challenges. But that's what's so nice about it is that you can kind of launch your, you don't have to build natively. So I don't have to build an iOS app and build an Android app. How you build it. You build it and then you can export it into the two and then you have to do bug testing because for some reason the Android one's not working the same as the iOS one. But that's, it's still, that's one of the best benefits about Unity and there's like a ton of, I'll say that there's like a lot of great help stuff online. They have a lot of great plugins for Unity and things like that. I mean we, if we went back, we might not have built in Unity. We originally used it because we wanted to do an augmented reality app and the augmented reality in our app kind of got scaled back because it became more of a feature than the point of the app. And we found building a walking tour app is not really a video game. It's almost like the menu system that you're going through as you're going. And that's, Unity is not necessarily built for that so it was actually quite, like building an image gallery in Unity proved to be a nightmare. We pulled off but it was like surprisingly you would think like, oh just building an image gallery. It was like way harder than if we wanted to build a whole 3D world. I mean we should say for live performance Unity and Unreal Engine are encouraging development of different applications for the gaming engine. We've been using it in performance. And what's great about it is the gaming folks have figured out the latency problem. Especially when we do live feed in theater where you always see like this three to five second gap. That's not there with Unity or Unreal. And Unreal is even giving out very large grants actually to people that are using the Unreal Engine in different ways. I mean like a totally 3D film that they're short film to put out. It was created in Unity and it was awesome. It looked like an awesome film. When you said that you might not have used like that as you were working with Unity if you were doing it back together if you were doing it over again based on what you know now would you still use Unity or would you use something else? I think we might have built natively just because we, that was the main thing is we just found that we built a lot of many systems and that might have been easier to build in one of the other platforms. But also I mean going back we kind of just was when we started working on it we kind of wound up having to use Unity and we wound up having to use all these other plugins because we we started this project for ARKit and before ARCore came out which so we had created our own way of doing AR and then we're like oh we had these new Google and Apple are supporting our grand reality now and we used those then we used Mapbox but if we because at the time Google Maps didn't work with Unity and now it does so like going back we might use Google Maps as well so there's just a whole bunch of things that if we started the project two years later probably would have been a little we might still update and work quick I used, I end up using React Native JavaScript basically that then rendered down into native iOS and Android and stuff so it's much better for things like the photo gallery 3D video game type stuff but it was definitely really key because I was the only only software person on this to not have multiple code bases doing completely different. We did some early prototypes it was just regular iOS stuff but it was definitely a big plus to be able to we're going to write it once and then Twitter with it to get it to come up with two different things so cross platform is really a key thing it's amazing we still may have done it just we would have talked about it more Andrew you mentioned to me in passing that you did like some server side management for accessibility did you maybe speak to us about that a little bit and Tristan I don't know if that's part of your work as well. Yeah, because like I said the project you would be assigned different basically when the show starts you sign in, you give your code and everything onto the app it would be checking in with the server you decide where you're going to go so everybody ended up getting a different experience with the different locations in a different order nobody would get to see all of them unless they were super fast but usually not and some locations only had one or two people at a time and so those were only a handful of people that got to see it but what's great is at the end of the show everyone gathered together at the end and everyone had a totally different experience of what they saw on board order but what was nice about that is that when people were signing up we actually had a part of the registration form was optional on the second page do you have any it wasn't just like I have mobility issues yes no it was sort of a drop down menu with various options I sometimes get sore maybe I don't want to hike across the city 20 times or all the way down to like I am in a wheelchair and we had some other thing for hearing and some other thing for vision and what was great especially for the way finding is that if you'd said that you have some mobility issues it would actually give you closer locations to go to and then we also were able to flag some of the locations on the server side is just because of the way that it was tough to get a dozen locations that fit all of our criteria that allowed people coming through so a few of them just were not going to be accessible for people who couldn't climb stairs for example so those were just discreetly removed from the options for those people and you never know nobody gets to see everything anyway so it didn't feel like oh well you can't see the real show it was just like these are the options that you get so it was nice we were able to use to provide like a custom experience that didn't feel like you're going off the other way yesterday when you were talking to me you also said that there was a within the app that information was then able to go out to sort of the point people and they were also prepared to support those people when they arrived which I thought was really kind of great each location had a site manager and we had the software also had a web interface that the site managers could use on the phone they would show who's on their way how many people are on their way and have their little map and show where they are so it was constantly the phones were constantly checking back in every few seconds so you could see how long they've been on their way so if it looks like they're lost you can text them or whatever and try to get them back on the right track and then we could also show any accessibility issues and there was also a wheelchair they could send somebody over to make sure they get into the back door rather than the front door it has a big step or something like that so we were able to actually handle people as they were coming in much more and it makes it a customized experience for everyone. When I spoke to both of you too, one thing that I love about both of your apps and I'm in development right now with Pop Sandbox working on a show that uses On Foot called Search Party and one of the things that initially attracted me to On Foot was that both of these apps you can pre-download everything so you don't require data which thinking about accessibility because you know putting a show in Kingston was not willing to tell my entire audience like oh you got a stream for three hours you know and I think that's another really key element of both of your work is that you can pre-download, you don't need data can't exist on multiple kinds of devices that was a big part so we have a content management system as well and that's that's what I said when it's like oh if you have Wi-Fi and you have your own site you can do all these crazy things, you can have a massive app you can have these huge animated 3D models but when you're just doing self-catted walking tours you kind of just need to keep them small as small as possible so yeah we did everything we could to try and ramp all of our assets down I think I mentioned like our ghost models are really just 2D pictures that always face the camera and they're translucent so they kind of give off the feel that they're there but they're really just if you got to the side of them they would disappear yeah so there's that and as you mentioned we can pre-download, we keep our tours try to keep them under 40 megabytes 50 is as large as it might go and for accessibility we did a little bit where we are self-guided walking tours so there's only so much we can do we're definitely not the most wheelchair friendly but we have texts for all of our audio there's texts you can read, you have complete control of your audio settings Unity does have like a colorblind testing thing so you can try and put filters on to see and make sure that your app works for people who have colorblindness and then we did a lot of user testing so who were colorblind come and try the app, I had all age groups come and try the app to make sure we actually originally started with much longer walks and then realized that a 2 hour walking tour on a phone is not something people want to do and they get tired so we had to actually cut our tours down a little bit and we wound up creating a third tour out of all our content because they were too big so I'm just curious about what the physical distances are of a product that you think is manageable ours was different every time so everyone had to sell you different things and the other part that I'm trying to wrap my brain around is how much time someone doing it has been doing that versus doing that and I think our acts are a little bit different because yours was much more you're using the app by yourself to get an experience of things ours was definitely kind of a sidecar for the real experience which was the theater happening all around you including when you're on the way to things there might be wandering performers doing things and you're not sure if it's a real performance or just somebody in the street who's doing something weird but we really specifically tried to make sure that the app is fairly straightforward it's text, we're talking about 40, 50 megabytes ours is like 200k for all the data and it can download it right up front because it's mostly text a few small images and that means it's kind of innocuous it doesn't make for a flashy demo unfortunately but it's kind of fun when you're playing with it but one of the things we did make sure is that you always have control over the tempo of things, you can put it away it'll say here's some new content for you but until you tap on that it's not going to give you more so we're really worried people are going to start crossing the street and oh I got a new thing nobody got hit by a car during our shows, it was a bit out of a thousand people if we got hit, so that was good but yeah definitely the trying to back and forth of the tempo and keeping some agency for the users did you just have a voice to it or no, everything was it would buzz if you got a new thing coming in but yeah because you wanted them to be experiencing what was around them yeah and in the opening in the convening somebody mentioned that apps should be like Elijah and a Seder I can't remember exactly what but you know it's the empty table the empty seat at the table where it's he's kind of the most important person there but he's also not really there and it's kind of not really the key focus so it should be in this case it should be sort of a sidecar it should be there but not dominating the issue that I just wanted to point out which we started out developing an app on a platform called T-Tour which is an app development company yeah they got a lot of those and early on of course they wanted content they wanted people to develop content so we developed two or three two or three pieces on that platform and then they locked everybody out and became a service provider so they started developing their own content and that was their business model just to develop content for them so just to you know if we develop we develop it ourselves I just wanted to know what your script development process looked like were you working with writers and then tracking script changes in terms of like feeding that into iterations was there a lock date for the script it was a pretty well because nobody's really done anything like this before definitely and Zupa very much come up with an idea and then they're constantly working on the script and the production and everything else all the way through so it's not like we wrote it and now we're going to do it and in this case definitely we actually did a really early prototype just like a web based version of it of the software and we had some writers locally and some other ones coming in because there's all sorts of content when they arrived we'd give them a phone and say put this number in and then they'd actually go on one of these they'd actually try it out and that helped people understand kind of the medium but it was constantly they were iterating on their the scripts as we were doing this software people just had to understand what was going on I mean even some of the UI features we originally early on for sort of the how far or close or far you are sort of through something with stars and the stars fill in a bit more as you get closer and we thought we maybe change that to a progress bar or something else but by then the writers had sort of used the stars as a metaphor in some of the writing like the stars will guide you look to the stars to see now it's already in there so we can and then the captions and text were constantly being adjusted as well to try to tie things together and it was definitely a back and forth it was a huge amount of collaboration for everybody all the way through yeah ours is a little different and our writing process actually dramatically changed quickly though we were asking about length of tours ours are about 1.3 km our longest one is 2.2 km which might be a little much but it's all down Queen Street so it's fairly simple and our app tracks your state so if you want to stop and get a coffee halfway through turn the app off and come back and just keep walking so that's but just quickly on our writing process we originally started we partnered with the Haunted Vox who are based out of here in Kingston based out of Toronto and Ottawa and I used to be a Haunted Vox tour guide back in the day which is kind of how we had that partnership or had that introduction to them and so we used them to help us raise financing so we got them on board as our as our writer so give us some credibility but then as we kind of moved on from our Haunted tours when we started writing these culture tours we decided to move away from you know doing this partnership financing material, revenue sharing agreement with a local tour company and we just started hiring radio journalists to write research on board their own tour so we're working with Garvia Bailey who used to be at CBC and Jazz FM she wrote our West Queen West Hidden Histories tour and then we we spoke with Lana Gay from ND88 to write a music tour for Spadina so we started finding local people who were more kind of in green in that world and had their own studios and all the kind of things that we need if there was in either for either of you, if there were opportunities for the people doing the tours to provide, to create input, I mean I was thinking of Murmur and I don't know if you're familiar with Murmur which was in downtown Toronto Did you get a phone number on it on a lap post? Yeah, so can you talk a little bit about what the people on the what they might be able to do that was actually a key part of our production actually was the main the main sort of concept of this show was that there had been a collective in the late 60s who had come up with some kind of a utopian blueprint for the future city and they sort of fell apart out of their own divisions and whatever and the idea is everyone in the 2018 50 years later was going around and trying to sort of reconstruct what happened and what some of these ideals were on various themes and then produce their own blueprint for the future and so each location had a theme so there was love, art justice inclusion all these things there was 12 different themes and each performance and each set of clues had something to do with that particular theme and then at the end of the experience as you go through you know the performance etc and then afterwards to say so please share your thoughts about inclusion or justice or whatever and the whole thing would pop up and you'd actually be able to type in your thoughts and then that would go back to our server and at the big finale we actually had projection screens all over the place which was showing what people have been writing during the show anonymously it didn't have the names but you could actually see the people's feedback through it and then we actually collected everything into we updated the so there's a memento kind of version of the app which you can download which includes all of the submitted blueprint from all the different attendees so there's a lot of reading actually and some of it's just like a little emoji and other ones people work these huge essays on their phones during the middle of the show but it was definitely there was a lot of the whole idea was that you can have some things go back and forth we had a video projection people we had a special on their face where they could copy and paste it into the software which was kind of fun during the show basically and by the time you finished stuff's on the wall that somebody had written 20 minutes earlier which is kind of cool I have a question about the community engagement part of this work with respect to the locations that you're mapping to and I guess it's partly about the writing process like does how that impacts the right like when you meet a store owner or you talk to somebody who makes a living sitting on a corn like and what kind of work you do to in terms of working with the actual people who are living in the locations that the theater in Biber's are sort of seeing as actors I'm curious about that we do a lot we do a lot of buildings and a lot of the like we we're always looking for partnerships and cross-promotional partnerships so all the local business improvement authorities like where our tours are we try and get in touch with them they help us get in touch with stores locations and we have the ability to add partners into our app so we can feature and showcase people they'll have a different basically icon on the map that's not connected to the tour but you can click on it and learn more like the Honobar for example we promote their tours and drive you to their website to try and get you to go and take their walking tours and then we couldn't do our 360 photosphere without our those buildings letting us in so and that's kind of the way we do those is we just approach any building and ask them are you interested in promoting our app we will promote your local business we'll also give you VR code we'll take VR photography for you for free that you can put on your website if you'll let us use those pictures in our app and that's how we get all our local partnerships cool so that's awesome just in terms of the emotional and sort of I'm just curious about like the people because they're actors it may sound correct but I'm not the complexity of that question and I was the software person I mean Alex was here he'd be able to give you all sorts of stories on all sorts of things we had a lot of engagement with things and trying to make sure people were the wandering performers sometimes you weren't sure if they were a performer and definitely when people were doing the original like just private tours when we were getting people introduced to the software as the writers and stuff you kind of felt a bit paranoid because you're never sure if it's part of this show or part of it and we tried to bring that feeling through to the thing but I wasn't really involved in that there was definitely a lot of back and forth we went through so many different sites a bunch of them got cold feet and backed out at the last minute so it's always a struggle with getting these things organized and it's down to a factor of writing too exactly and then you got to change one of them was in an apartment which was a guest suite and a condo building people would be going up to the third floor on the hallways and we had to make sure that people were the people in the building weren't too disturbed by that they seemed pretty enthusiastic actually they were like oh there's a show going on this is really cool but definitely it was sort of a challenge there obviously just the people living on the streets it's a tricky balance I remember I read something that Alex had written in CATR and it was about ambience and that kind of tension of like is this real or is this not but I wonder also as developers of this you kind of have to shed a little bit of control I assume when you're moving through these spaces there's only so much that you can do about the world that's going to continue to move around the locations that you're setting we had five performances in the first two absolutely torrential downpours absolutely just complete soaking but everyone seemed to enjoy themselves anyway but it was definitely kind of like we all had baggies for everyone to put their phones in ours is more we lose buildings right before we launched there was a place called Jacobs Hardware it had been in Toronto for over 50 years it's like the local shop and it was a domino right before we launched so we had to go and re-photograph the building re-update all the content in our app luckily we can update our content while the apps are live same issue like Graffiti Alley or Graffiti Writer and the photographer were just down there the other day doing another interview with a graffiti artist and they realized they store building I had all this old art on it which is great because we have all the photographs we can commemorate the building and all the art that was there but it hurts us when we're trying to drive you to a location and use pictures to help assist you and there's nothing there that runs into issues and we were talking about the social multi trying out how you share things and we had actually looked at trying to do more users they could leave objects here and see what other people had left on site and all these different places and we actually ran into an issue because if you're doing a graffiti alley tour and you put digital graffiti on top of somebody else's graffiti there's something like ethical questions there and we're trying to work with the graffiti community who are notoriously they are very quiet they don't really want people knowing who they are like tagging their wall is very disrespectful so yeah that's the whole thing we're still trying to figure that out I wonder about how repeatable all the work that you put in to create for that show for 5 performances is that material that you've created adaptable more easily to a new piece or do you feel you would be starting from scratch or you have short cuts now towards well we turned it into a, we tried to extract it into a platform that can be used for all sorts of things so I'm leaving today because I want to be back in Halifax for June 16th which is Bloomsday when James Joyce's Ulysses happens on June 16th 1904 and people do reenactments and retrace it in Dublin and I've always wanted to do a Bloomsday in Halifax we have all the similar architecture and stuff and so I've adapted some of this to be sort of a do your own Bloomsday kind of wander around the different locations in Halifax and still fine tuning some of that but definitely the idea is that we could take this and do it in various places the writing was specific to specific things in Halifax but it could be adaptable to other stuff and the idea is a platform allowing multiple uses and Is that available for download or no? It's not going to get download it's more like there's a server side component content management that would be customized in various ways but definitely I have cards we can talk definitely there's something we're looking into having people do using it for various things Well, Tristan and I were just chatting earlier I started working with the Pop Sandbox developing this app for a performance called Search Party which was a locative app that brought you to places all around downtown Kingston and audiences would be prompted to do stuff at these locations and one of the things that we wanted to work through was you can probably speak to it better than I can but like synced up music so that everybody that was in the app at the same time if your clock was at the same time as everyone around you you could be listening to the same music in sync with everybody and through this conversation that was something that we needed now the app has that for other people to offer Yeah, we were able to build that into our content management system I'm not sure exactly what our developers did but we now have the ability to launch time-based events through our content management system so if everybody has the same time they can roughly start listening to things at the same time we can also reveal a hidden spot at 8 o'clock at night or if there's something new here at 8 we can do that as well we're definitely trying to think about there's more we should probably do but that was the simple solution we came up with at the time as long as nobody's changed the time on there don't do it usually that's not a problem that much so just so we know we have about 10 minutes left I'm not sure if this is the right venue for this question but I'm really excited about using an app that's the thing I'm walking away so far like I'm very excited here's the thing the show that I want to incorporate this into my audience may or may not have a phone right? so I'm working with people that are long-term in long-term patients I'm hoping to connect with people that literally are communities in northern Manitoba that don't use cell phones because they don't have the internet no really though, right? I don't want to have to say if you don't have a phone you can't participate in this show I know with the work that I do at the schools you can donate old computers and schools that need computers can contact this organization and you'll get computers does anyone do that with phones? does anyone know? like if I have an old phone is there a place where maybe this is like a question for outside of this conversation even if we as artists dumped our old phones into like a box perhaps that box could rotate around for shows to then make them accessible for people that don't because if they don't need anything other than just one little download I don't know does anybody know about that? making sure they don't be worth on pretty old devices like it's just text we're the opposite we've got work on a lot of phones but for us it was sort of an accessibility issue to make sure that no matter if you had a really old we did have some issues, some headaches with very old Android devices because of some of the location permissions the way they do permissions was changed because of the headache but we actually looked into trying to figure out we contacted Rogers and people like that to see if they had they know they recycled them a lot of times we take the phone with us and we looked into a bunch of things I know Zupa bought a bunch of iPads for their previous production and archiving missing things or they got a bunch of iPads but they weren't the cellular GPS version so we couldn't use them for our show but definitely it was something we were trying to figure out and yeah we were looking around I'm sure there could be something Partner with a school is another option I know we've looked at partnering with a tech program at one of the universities in Toronto because they have a whole bunch of them because they have to provide them for their students you have to be really careful and not break them but they sometimes have that ability for you if you have a connection with them you can get access to the devices through there The other thing I might recommend Angela is you could post it on Slack post someone a question on Slack you can get a network from fold of people like do you have a phone, can we connect mail it to me or something like that maybe post it on Slack and see I have a big basement like all of them pass them around find me for the other festival because I actually have one you can take one of mine I could start a digital tool library there's definitely some of that in Halifax I know a bunch of tablets for my show and I'm like I wish I'd known that they have the tablets Yeah, we had I know some friends work in app development one of the ones in the app studio and they definitely have a big library of all sorts of especially Android devices of all different sizes and shapes and platforms and things but I don't know if they're really they did talk to them but they weren't super eager to have their test devices out in the world rained on and dropped and all that kind of thing so it's a bit tricky because of the but yeah, ultra phones I think people just sort of trade them in rather than I don't know I'm going to change that So we have about five minutes left I'm wondering if either of you or both of you would like to speak to like where you see this going or what the potentials are for this five years in the future nearly no one budget but what are we thinking that this activity, these locative apps can do for live performance in the future or what do you call it? Well I'm hoping I'm hoping GBS gets better that's my big thing and it will, I mean they're constantly getting better they're going to build better G networks that are going to be work better for that, data plans are going to get better in Canada over time hopefully and start matching up with what the US has Roger's just did the big thing so yeah, I mean the tech's just going to keep moving forward and the hardest thing is just trying to keep your apps up to date I find with the tech that's coming down the pipeline is the hardest part because they're always kicking you out or adding new features that then make your apps not run anymore I think there's a lot of potential coming out I feel like this whole sort of thing about having virtual spaces on top of the real world or whatever is definitely we're doing it it seems to be a thing that's sort of happening how different people sort of approaching it from different directions and the phone is sort of this great little portal for that kind of thing that you take around it's a very high tech device but sort of very intimate and personal it's a great combination of these things but I think this I've always been fascinated by layering worlds on top of worlds the board has map, the map is the territory is the map or whatever it's that kind of thing I'm always interested in and we can actually do a map describing by using our phones for that which is kind of fun I think this is going to get more so people always talk about oh we're going to have little like AR, Google Glass Glasses and stuff like that but I think the phone actually is kind of a sweet spot in terms of it doesn't get in the way too much but it can allow you to do things and I mean maybe we're going to get more sophisticated with some of that but I think the phone is actually great we're going to get pocket sized VR glasses and then look at them and take them off and then yeah AR is going to come farther like right now it's all horizontal plane based but eventually one day I'm hoping I'm going to be able to put something in a window would be amazing I'm going to put a ghost in a window but I still can't do that yeah I think the AR is going to get better I know that Apple just announced a bunch of new ones where it actually will figure out where things are in depth and put things behind and actually clip your objects properly which is I can't imagine the kind of crazy process a newer model phone that's not going to be your left over old ones for that but yeah so some of that's going to be improving and we were working with Nokia Bell Labs Experiments Art Technology and what they're doing now is disaggregating with cell phone because they're really disturbed by this phenomenon of people being locked into a screen and they feel like they've encouraged an inauthentic connection they're talking about a little higher piece and a little arm and a little pack but when Google Glass turned out to be this whole the aspect of glass holes was the term I was I think you don't know if someone's actually recording you or not and all that kind of thing yeah it was an effort to be kind of dodgy and whether they're watching you I guess people are saying that people with air pods and like I guess in the states don't take them out even when they're talking in cafes ordering coffee or whatever so you don't know if they're actually listening to you or not it's like come on you're just wearing them around the house yeah I mean yeah I just tried the Bose AR headset which is basically just spatial audio headset but it's just a pair of sunglasses and they built speakers into the frame so you don't even people aren't even wearing headsets but they're not listening to you it's really good actually the audio quality is great but you can still hear the world around you which is really important and if I'm standing beside you can I hear your music you would have to like lean in and like okay that's cute any other thoughts, file thoughts? any other file thoughts for me too yeah I don't know I mean I definitely you mentioned staring at the phones I mean part of the reason we were excited to build this app we built was that we wanted to get people outside into the world walking around that was very important for us and we do find like people don't just stare at their phone on our app because it's a walking tour and you're staring at the building and you're walking with your eyes up and then you get buzzed in your pocket and you realize you have somebody to do yeah similar thing we tried to make it non-intrusive to be a sidecar for a performance so people are out there and people really discovered new aspects of the city they enjoyed being out in it and seeing rediscovering new angles and that was part of the production as well was about the history of the city and the potential of the city and where it could go but definitely it became a great way to re-experience things in a heightened way rather than just great thank you all so much