Notes - Perceptor

april 11, 2014 – casper

This is week 192.

It’s been quiet at the studio. Xav moved on to start a new adventure at Supersteil – and he took his enthousiasm, positive attitude and incredible barista skills with him. Our donuts have never missed their quintessential counterpart more. Good luck Xavi!

By tradition, April is high World Press Photo season. This week, we finished exhibition apps for iOS and Android and the Multimedia Contest kiosk app. Bastiaan is installing the latter onto 12 iMacs as we speak, so I’m afraid his weekend won’t come early.

Last Monday, we told about the come-into-being of Crowdpilot at This Happened Utrecht, which was fun as we actually Crowdpiloted our presentation. In case you’re interested: check out the 10 minute talk here.

This morning, Finn came by bringing a gigantic box of donuts. Later, an even bigger box full of specialty beers was delivered. I guess life is like a box of chocolates: sooner than later, you’re gonna get pretty darn fat – at least at Perceptor. Bye!

february 7, 2014 – bastiaan

This is week 183. Err.., and 182.

We've been slacking in the Week Notes department. Mea culpa.

Crowdpilot – the app that will let you crowdsource your conversations – is about to launch after a period of relentless tweaking. Getting the Turks to play along with our little scheme was quite a challenge, but we finally nailed it by going back to basics.

Perloo, our crazy-hard iPhone puzzle game will launch February 20 and we're in the midst of final preparations for that launch. Last week we had a great time showing Perloo at the Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht. We met lots of nice people and got some solid advice on marketing the game (thanks Adriaan!). We also has the opportunity to play Metrico and meet the team behind it, which was great and worth the trip on its own.

On thursday, we attended the special IXD14 This Happened in Amsterdam which was inspiring as always. Also on the side: work on Punchtime with the Amsterdam Filmacademy and preparations for other upcoming projects. Phew!

Oh, and that sky? That's Tuna, where we shot the Perloo trailer.

january 24, 2014 – bastiaan

This is week 181.

The week kicked off with exciting news: the person we approached for voice overs in Perloo agreed to work with us. This meant that we could finish up a lot of loose ends. We spent time polishing and tweaking the game, and started writing about it. Even though we have a very clear idea of what the game is about, capturing that idea in words is always a challenge. Its the last open end that we're now carefully closing up: a thought that is both extremely satisfying and paralyzingly terrifying.

Also, time was spent on Crowdpilot where we are trying to cooerce the Mechanical Turk crowd to play along with us. Generally, MT tasks don't leave much room for creativity, and trying to get the workers to think outside of habits turns out to be quite challenging. After countless revisions to the style, tone and format of our questionnaire, we seem be making progress.

november 22, 2013 – casper

This is week 172.

Three projects are fighting for our attention at the moment: Crowdpilot, the new World Press Photo website and our soon-to-be-released iPhone game Perloo. Last weekend, we shot some eerie footage in Sweden for Perloo’s trailer and today, Nadine visited us to play the game (she got a banana-flavoured donut in return). It was exciting and inspiring to see her engage with the game and its concept.

Sharing our lunch with her, we ran Crowdpilot since we didn't know what to say to a Canadian stranger. Luckily, the crowd proved to be very helpful by suggesting we ask her about poutine, a typical Canadian dish that, as we found out soon after, is a mixture between Dutch signature dishes patatje oorlog and kapsalon. Let’s have some!

august 30, 2013 – casper

This is week 160.

Quiet, still
You feel there's nothing going on

With half of the studio on vacation, things have been quiet over the past weeks. Nevertheless, we made some steady progress on a couple of interesting projects.

Puck Verkade asked us to create her a new website, and besides being a talented artist, she’s also a great person to work with. We expect the website to launch in the second half of September.

Also, we’re partnering with World Press Photo to exhibit their Multimedia Contest in Rio de Janeiro. At this pilot exhibition we’ll be trying out a couple of new things, a Twitter-based guestbook app for iPad being one of them.

Lastly, work continues on Crowdpilot, an incredibly exciting project. We’re still in the process of overcoming some serious technical hurdles, but once we have nailed those, your dates, arguments and meetings will never be the same. Ever.