Last week, I chaired the “All in hand: Working with handheld devices conference”, which took place at the Royal College of Surgeon in London. It included various presentations from small- to large-scale UK museums discussing their experience with mobile interpretation.

The dictionary on my trusty Mac tells me that 'glug' can be either a verb meaning to drink liquid with a hollow gurgling sound (e.g. he glugs down half his beer) or a noun meaning an amount of liquid poured from a bottle (e.g. a couple of good glugs of Dubonnet). I tell you this because I feel the two examples listed about the word probably give you a better impression of what the first ever Glug Brighton was like than any amount of material I could write ever would. But I'll try anyway:

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend i-Design, a one day conference and showcase for anyone with an interest or passion for interactive design and the digital arts. The programme certainly lived up to its aims as I came away truly inspired and entertained as well as being somewhat perplexed too!

The day kicked off with a panel debate centred around the idea of ‘Post Digital’ asking the question, 'If everything is digital, then what's next?' In a world where everything references digital media, how does our industry need to respond? This was a fascinating insight into the minds of the panel members more than anything, with the illustrious Adrian Shaughnessy leading the discussions.

This then lead the way for the first 5D interlude of the day by MOTH who beautifully showed their passion for experimental technology and for pushing the boundaries of traditional VJing. MOTH bridge the divide between video mixing and street art, generating site-specific video graffiti designed in response to the morphology, texture and ambience of the spaces and structures of the outside world.

Another presentation that particularly caught my interest was one by Lichtfaktor. You might recognise the work of these lords of luminosity from the TalkTalk television adverts (which also bookend each segment of ITV's popular X-factor). Their work in light-writing is spectacular, ranging from relatively standard incarnations of the practice, through to an amazing light-printer that allows pre-written messages to be created and captured in the same way as standard light-writing.

Open Frameworks is a technology that we here at Cogapp are very keen on - Joe, for example, implemented it to develop our people pong game.

If the digital door is closed, can this create a frenzy? I was watching a BBC documentary about The Beatles first visit to America a couple of weeks ago. This little nugget of film making was a collection of behind the scenes clips of the fab four and the madness that unfolded around them: no narration, no colour and no surprises there. We've all seen the photos a million times and this is certainly another brilliantly timed peice of Beatlemania PR to coincide with the 2009 re-mastered back catalogue. But one of the things that struck me most was not the music, but the obsession that grew from the demand for sightings and snippets of information, however mundane, that could make headline news and make or break a die hard fan. They just couldn't get enough. Everybody knows their name

No, this isn't the new craze in ballroom dancing, nor is it the first attempt at communication with alien beings. It is something altogether more exciting! Bear with me and I'll reveal all...

Thursdays are always a much anticipated day here at Cogapp HQ. It's nothing to do with their proximity to the weekend, nor are any of us fans enough of Thor as to warrant getting excited by a day named after him. No - the fourth working day of the week heralds the arrival of Cake Thursday for all Cogapp kind. At 4 o'clock on this hallowed day, we all gather together for a bit of time over cake, tea and all manner of other delicacies and discuss what we're all getting up to (in between bites of dessert-y delights of course).

However, whether it be due to anarchy or inspiration, our Technical Director Ben suggested that instead of the normal occurrence of informal chats and exchanges, last week's Cake Thursday (yes... I am going to insist that 'cake' be capitalised in this instance) be dedicated to a brief session of Pecha Kucha presentations, cunningly titled Pechapp Cakecha (... see what we did there).

Working on the project as AV producer, our main challenge was to strike the right balance between the variety and scale of the operation and the limitations of our budget, never forgetting that the audience’s experience is really what counts the most. Here’s the story behind just a handful of the 10 AV presentations we created...

Right Whale

For the glass-bottomed boat exhibit, the museum asked us to create the effect of looking over a parapet onto a plate of glass with temperate sea creatures swimming beneath it. So we needed to provide moving images of a whole host of creatures, from whales to whitebait as viewed from above. Of course, the problem for us was that most of the time, anybody who videos fish will do so in the water face to face, not looking down at their dorsal fins!

The first solution was to computer generate them, and we were ready to do that, but it just wasn’t possible within our budget. Instead, as well as trawling the best film and video archives in the world I took my own camera to several Sea Life Centres on the South Coast and dangled it into the water to capture footage of desirable species from above. Luckily for us, the larger creatures we found in the libraries - whales, dolphins and turtles etc - often swim on their side, so there’s plenty of footage of them swimming by with their backs to the camera. When the display is seen from above, this gives you just the right effect.