Announcements
The Open Publishing Lab's presentation files are now available for download from the Tools of Change website .
Lab Sponsors
Meetu (the Social Networking Game)
Website: http://opl.rit.edu/meetu/
Collaborators: Abdulrahman Matsah, Gordon Toth, Guy Paddock, Jacob Weigand, Matthew Bernius, Michael Riordan, Mike Rubits
About the Project
A game platform that is easy to learn and fun to play, which gets event attendees to meet and interact with each other, and automatically ties those connections back to online spaces
The technologies
Gameplay
Visitors to the festival will register for the game at OPL's Imagine RIT festival booth, and receive a name tag, game card, and 2D bar code stickers. Each name tag will have three colored icons representing a players primary interests. When a player sees another player who shares one of their icons, they trade stickers, adding to each game card.
The cards are collected at the end of the day and scanned. Barcodes are compared against a database, creating connections between players, and agregating the total number of connections for a player. The results, including each persons connections are placed on the web. Each player recieves an e-mail with a link to their webpage.
Players can visit each other’s LinkedIn and Facebook pages, and are given the option to get into e-mail contact.
Since the goal is a number of connections between players, and any amount of data collection and comparison is possible, the resulting data can be visualized in an infinite amount of ways, and via nearly any kind of mashup.
Project History
On May 3rd, the Rochester Institute of Technology will be hosting it's first ever Festival of Innovation, Imagine RIT. The OPL's darling project, the Social Networking Game, took place during the event to encourage visitors to the festival to discover and interact with others, provide a way for players to see how their interest link them into the greater RIT and Rochester Community, and highlight RIT’s strengths in the area of social computing and print.
Utilizing an open source system for creating and reading 2D barcodes, Google's ZXing, the team at the OPL has created a utility for on the spot generation, printing, and processing of unique, dynamically generated, 2D barcodes. This relies upon a database, and an application put together by our team.
Collaborators:
Lab for Social Computing
School of Print Media
SPM Digital Publishing Center
