Roomware: Toys for Boys?

​What do boys like to do on a Saturday afternoon? When they’re young they play football or videogames. All grown up Tijs Teulings, Robert Gaal and James Burke prefer tinkering with interactive spaces. Exploring a different physical space each workshop, this saturday their playground is located at the Offices of Nulaz in a rather posh neighborhood in Amsterdam. Almost every month Teulings, Gaal and Burke meet other programmers to build interactive space. Here they program for the Roomware server, an open source program which is to facilitate interaction with physical space using technologies such as Bluetooth or Rfid. Either to extend the existing software or they build tools which use the server. Yet is this indeed just an extended playground? Or is the Roomware project on to something hot?

When the Roomware Project was founded in 2006 by Teulings, Gaal and Burke while they were having dinner at Club 11 during Mediamatic's Playing FlickR event, they thought it would be fun to create an application with which visitors could interact with the physical space and with each other while enjoying a meal. Yet this application was to move beyond communication. In their fantasy interactive space, Teulings, Gaal and Burke imagined that users would be able to display their identity in the rooms of the restaurant. It's from this grass root idea that the hybrid between rooms (physical enclosed space) and software application emerged, hence the name Roomware.

In 2008 the Roomware concept has developed to enclose not only the creations of interactive spaces by Roomware themselves, but also to enable third parties to construct hybrid space. In it's workshops Roomware aims to develop a framework and a server which enables users to easily build their own mobile and locative application using Bluetooth, Rfid or other similar technologies. And what is more, all users are able to build upon and improve the Roomware software. Creating, in a sense, a network of programming playgrounds.

In it's dual function as facilitators of and experimenters with interactive physical spaces Roomware strifes to bring the Dutch programming scene to a new level. Roomware appears to be a playful project with a commercial output, while (or perhaps because of) keeping software open. But it's not all technology that shines.

Present at the Roomware workshop on march 22nd was NetNiet.org, an Utrecht based association for media and locative arts. At the up-coming Impakt Festival NetNiet.org wants to produce a tagging system within the theme of YourSpace. Visitors can rate others in the room, and that results in the amount of privileges the rated person gets. Yet NetNiet.org lacks the technological expertise to program such an application. At the Roomware workshops the cultural side of media art meets it's technological counterpart, thus enabling an enrichment for both sides. e-Culture gets it's technological input, while Roomware technology can be tested and experimented with in a cultural broader context.

Visit the Project Roomware website