Hi everyone,

Since announcing it on Tuesday, I’ve had a really positive response to this project. The day I put my message out I got this postcard from Rachel, which is absolutely perfect:postcard

Obviously I’m still looking for a wide variety of farewell messages but right now, if you don’t know what format to record your message in, I’m particularly interested in receiving messages that would be left on his answering machine. In addition, if anyone could help me get hold of a decent sound file with the phrases “You have 3 new messages. To listen to your messages, press 1″, “First, new message. Recorded at xx:xx am xxth July”, and so on, with the proper voice, I would be heavily indebted to you.

As for the story as a whole, I have mentioned to a few people so far that this will be a story told in augmented reality. The medium of which has been designed by a doctoral student here at EPFL and consists of simple black-and-white markers that are identified, not by their shape, but by the way in which the shapes are nested within one another. Here are a few examples: http://web.media.mit.edu/~enrico/research/research.php When you scan these markers with your mobile phone, either an image, or a piece of video or audio will be associated to that marker and downloaded to your phone, which you can then view or listen to. It’s not as good as some of the other augmented reality stuff I’ve seen online but I like the way this idea can turn a story into an interactive treasure hunt for all the different markers.

I have also decided that this story will have two distinct sides to it: the farewell messages, and the reasons why he’s leaving, which will amount to reasons why he needs to run away. To this end, I’ve also decided that 1) he’s starting here in Lausanne, Switzerland and 2) he’s undertaking this journey by bike, so that he’s more difficult to trace (no license plates, or tickets in his name). These two sides of the story will be mostly jumbled up so when someone scans a marker it’ll either be a friendly message or a clue. If you have any suggestions as to how you think I could improve that model, please let me know.

That’s it for now. I’ll post another update next weekend.

All the best, Chris.

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