Introducing Festipods!

Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of a project we have been working on for the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab – introducing Festipods!

Festipods is a project commissioned by Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, following our participation in Culture Hack Scotland.

Festipods is designed to be a fun and engrossing way of visualizing the Edinburgh festival events that you have attended. You can create your own little petri dish full of little musical creatures which represent the shows you have attended. They are awfully cute, though some are a bit scary. They swim around and make noise, and you can create a link to send to others to show off!

How does it work?
Step 1: Go to Festipods.co.uk!
Step 2: Search for an event that you are attending (or have attended)
Step 3: When you’ve found your event, click “add to pond”
Step 4: Say hello to your Festipod! Make sure to have your volume turned on…
Step 5: Repeat!

Festipods was built using the brand-new Festivals API, which combines loads of data from seven festivals: Edinburgh Book Festival, Edinburgh MELA, Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and the Fringe Festival.

To make Festipods, we created a pretty huge library of heads, body segments, and tails. Check out the amazing sprite sheet:

Each festival was assigned a color scheme…for example, here are the heads that Sean made for the Jazz and Blues Festival events:

and here are some Fringe tails:

In the API every event contains a unique identifying number, which we used to generate a unique combination of head, body, tail, size, and sound for each one.

Oh yes, that last one is important. Make sure you have the sound turned on, because each festipod emits a sound, and combining different ones together can have some pretty great results!

Unfortunately, because we are using WebGL, Festipods will not work in Safari or Internet Explorer or early versions of Firefox. Bleeding edge.

To weave all of this together Jon made use of some pretty awesome libraries. These include:
– Tonfall for the audio
– The ubiquitous Box 2D for the physics modelling
– Processing.js to put it all together
and much more.

This project is fully open source – download the whole project here!

So go check it out, and let us know what you think! Share it with your friends! Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen, most of all Rohan at Festivals Innovation Lab. Of course, please get in touch with us if you have any questions – info@luckyframe.co.uk.