In the Summer of 2008 I worked on Black
Cloud, an environmentally-focused
alternate reality game designed for students of Manual Arts High School.
Students participated in two teams that observed data captured from real
environmental sensors placed around the neighborhood. Each environmental sensor
(named ‘Pufftrons’) sensed a combination of VOCs, light, sound, temperature, and
carbon dioxide.
My responsibility was to create the website that allowed them to interact with
the real-time data. Each Pufftron sent the environmental data through an
SMS-to-email gateway that was stored in an SQL database. The data was displayed
as a time series accessed via points on a map with Adobe
Flex.
