The Alphalabs competition has recently been run in conjunction with Nokia and onedotzero, with the intention of getting developers to think a little more creatively. BY mixing design, art and technology some pretty amazing ideas and apps have now been put through the testing process. Read on to find out the winner of the Alphalabs competition.
The winner of the £5000 top prize has been revealed as FOUNDBITE, which is a simple but beautifully conceived idea that encourages people to share experiences in a new way. By merging photos, sounds files and even mapping locations together into a personal snapshot of time and location, Foundbite has the potential to be huge and can be spun off into multiple applications and uses.
The 10 runners up who will all receive £500, get to tell their own stories in their own words are:
This is "Drum Machine". It's an experiment into using the phone to represent another physical object and interacting within a virtual world. As the name suggests, the app allows the phone to represent a drum stick and by moving the phone we can simulate hitting different parts of a drum kit.
TellDJ Arena is my entry to the Alphalabs competition. TellDJ Arena is the 'test-bed' for features and ideas that are then upgraded into the upcoming TellDJ app for Windows Phone. TellDJ is a service which sits between you and your media player and uses the Windows Phone platform to enhance the user's music experience. It is designed to question accepted methods to interact with our music collection and provide new and unique alternates.
Positron is a fast paced arcade racing game in which you must navigate a complex maze while trying not to crash into the walls or your own trail which you leave behind!
Recordoid turns your phone into social dictaphone. Application interface simulates retro tape cassette recorder with all details and allows you to record voice notes using three different quality levels. You can easily add text note and GPS position to your recording and display the location on the map.
This experiment investigates what the world around us looks like when faces are replaced by emoticons. Building on the last experiment (chimp) and using the excellent face.com web service, this experiment takes peoples pictures and analyses them for happy and sad faces...
I always love the crystals of ice formed on my window pane in the winters. Frosty window is an attempt to recreate those random crystals of the nature on our favorite window to the digital world . Currently the app is incomplete and still needs a lot of work. What I am showing is just the working engine with base colours.
This app allows real-time colour manipulation of an image using the device's accelerometer. The video shows this better than I can explain - sorry about the dodgy screen on my phone!
BEATBOX SAMPLER
After coming away from the ALPHALABS.CC kick off in London, my head was buzzing with ideas. It took a few weeks to think of a good concept. I was planning on working on the project alone so everything would be down to me; this helped with the concept, as I would not have a graphic designer, illustrator or musician to help with assets for the project. This got me thinking about beat boxers. A beat boxer can make sounds and music with nothing but their voice, so this ito write an app to capture the spirit of this.
THIS IS MY STORY
When I found out about the contest I struggle with my lack of time to be able to submit. I finally got a little bit of time free and I took it just for this contest.
When thinking about an app to submit, I almost went with the idea of just building some cool and crazy arty user interface for the app. However, I finally decided to build something that in my opinion will be a lot more useful, simple yet powerful and with a lot of potential to be used, shared and enhanced.
Imagine a boutique hotel; A calm and tranquil place you can visit and enjoy some of the wonderful podcasts provided by the BBC. This experiment fuses the broadcasting artform with the beautiful curves of the Lumia 800. Colour tones are carefully selected to blend in with the experience. Sit back, relax, what will you listen to today?
You can find out more about the competition over at Alpha Labs