Inspired by athletes, driven by students, Project Blue Sky is a community-based grass-roots initiative. With the upcoming Vancouver games in mind, our team at the Masters of Digital Media program has  been developing an online widget that will reside on a social network, specially created for the project. The social network encourages enviro-conscious teens, young adults and athletes to blog, upload photos and videos, and share their stories with the world. The widget will take peoples saved kilometers  and aggregate them.

WHY?????

With less than a year before the world visits Vancouver to celebrate the Winter Games, Project Blue Sky encourages everyone in the province to work together to reduce the amount of carbons emitted using kilometers as our common metric.

Every little bit helps, and if everyone in BC contributes even just 5 car-free km each week, we can accumulate 1 000 000 000 km! That’s our goal.

Contribute to the goal creatively by turning off lights at home, using energy-saving bulbs or turning down your heat or air conditioning. We’ll be tracking the total contributions everyone makes so we can all be kept up to date on our progress. Remember, the sky’s the limit.

Send us your kilometers, and share your stories with the world: upload a video, share pics of you in action and post your stories. Let’s team up and keep our climate-friendly province, well – friendly.

Below you can input your kilometers and help reach our goal!

The great thing about the widget is that the widget can be shared across 80 social networks! Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Friendster, Hi5 and many many more! Simply click Get & Share at the bottom of the widget and you will be able to post the widget to your personal profile on many social networks!

I had the fabulous opportunity of attending Northern Voice for the second time. This is the social media conference for Vancouver BC. Social Media enthusiast from around the world gather at UBC to have unique learning sessions and panels.  The conference covers everything from blogging, flickr, other media channels and more. This is a great learning opportunity for anyone who is interested in expanding their knowledge in this field.

http://2009.northernvoice.ca/

 Women in Games Vancouver BC will be  holding a mixer to coincide with Game Design Expo 2009.
The free Game Design Open House on Sunday February 8 will feature a “Women in Games” panel and the announcement of a 30K Women in Games scholarship to VFS’s Game Design Program. 

Digital Alchemy will be hosting the event at their studio in Gastown. They will have some drinks and appetizers on hand as well as a line up of international DJ’s and game stations. 

Game Design Expo 2009

Game Design Expo is an annual event for game industry professionals and enthusiasts hosted by Vancouver Film School’s Game Design program. The third-annual Game Design Expo 2009, hosted by Vancouver Film School (VFS) can hear from leading minds in the industry at the free Game Design Open House on Sunday, February 8, including exclusive presentations by representatives from LucasArts, Big Fish Games and Vicarious Visions.

A special ‘Women in Games’ panel featuring panelists from Electronic Arts, Deep Fried Entertainment, Hydrogen Whiskey Studios and Hothead Games will coincide that day with the launch of the inaugural Women in Games $30,000 scholarship to Vancouver Film School’s Game Design program. Other scholarship opportunities will be announced at the Sunday Open House.

And throughout the day, visitors will be able to experience the acclaimed one-year VFS Game Design program firsthand – test-driving student- and alumni-created games, and enjoying sample classes like Level Design and Storytelling taught by expert VFS instructors.

The Open House is expected to fill to capacity again in 2009, so those interested are strongly encouraged to register soon. Event details and registration are available at www.gamedesignexpo.com

Today we had the privilege of participating in a design workshop. This workshop was lead by Tom Wujek, Fellow from Autodesk. The workshop showed us we can use agile development and visual process to come up with ideas and structure our projects. We all sat and stayed in our teams for two days. During this time we looked at many different aspects of our projects and really started the process for this terms Industry Projects at The Centre for Digital Media.

Today is sort of a milestone for most of us at the Masters of Digital Media Program. The next gens (1st yr) and the first borns (2nd yr) students headed back to Great Northern Way to start out spring semester. More importantly for us first borns, this is the last semester of our masters program. This semester I will be working with Samer El-Nashar to rework the Masters of Digital Media Program website and to create a stronger identity. Other students have projects ranging from mobile gaming to a project for the Olympics. Now we are … Back @ it!!!!!
 

Last night Wired Woman and Women in Games Vancouver, BC were very successful in putting on their Second Women in Games Mixer. With supporters from the game industry such as Radical, Relic, Hydrogen Whiskey, Big Fish Games, Seven Group Digital Media and more! Women and men from around town came out to support women in the games industry. To kick off the night the women battled the men in a 3 song Rockband showdown. It was a great way to start off the night and get people going. The event was also a great way for women to create more networking opportunities for women working in the games industry. 

Last week I was up at Whistler to document Crankworx 2008. You can read that post here.

The video below showcases the days events. Enjoy

As many of you know I am in progress of my Masters of Digital Media. In the spring of 2008 the Masters of Digital Media Program and the UBC Fisheries Centre collaborated on a project to produce a virtual ocean.

The two teams got together to visualize and understand human impacts on fish populations. The MDM students were given access to live data of the fish populations off the Gulf of Mexico. They then moved forward and used the blender game engine to visualize the data. They modeled the ocean and then attatched live data to visually show what is happening in the oceans. This in my mind is ground-breaking, visualizing this data effects people more than just numbers and pie charts.