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TIFF Nexus is a series of creative jams. It's a series of conferences.
It's designed to bring diverse creators from the filmmaking,
the game making, and the digital art worlds together to share ideas,
to learn from each other, to learn from industry professionals
and experts, to do hands on workshops and creation together,
and to really.. innovate.
The peripherals initiative is happening right now and that's
bringing together game makers with hardware hackers and hardware
engineers to really innovate in the area of interface.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get game developers and hardware hackers
to team up and create non-traditional gameplay and really interesting
non-traditional hardware controllers.
You're going to see some new controls, some new styles of games, some new
styles of stuff that hopefully when you look at it you're like I've just
never seen that before because really until recently getting an indie game
dev together with an indie hardware guy just hasn't really been done.
So we tossed a couple of ideas around and we came up with some really
bizarre things like full scale chainsaws and head-crushing things
and lava.
Everyone had a chance to show off their own projects and Alex that I
partnered with had a really cool video of the magnetic levitation that kind
of really fired my imagination up so what I want to do is basically get rid
of them instead of one and use it sort of like a playing field of
identifying fluctuation. Turns out it's a lot harder than it looks.
You're on a ship, you're piloting a ship using technology you don't quite
fully understand and you're just kind of managing all of the parts of the
ship as it's falling apart.
We dreamed up the idea of taking optical controls and then building a
flight or like a flying video game experience around it
and that's when we hooked up, found out that in Toronto there's actually
a whole bunch of this kind of gadgetry going on and joined forces.
So Damian has put together a prototype that's given us the sort of sense of
what it's going to actually be like.
Kind of a neat idea of you know like an Austin Powers or like a
Mission Impossible type of scenario. You know a spy mission and trying to
navigate past dangerous lasers and not get caught by security people.
Compared to some of the other stuff, our project is definitely one of the
simpler general mechanics but for us it's something that I'm purely
software developer and Vlad is more of a hardware guy so for us it's a
project that neither one of us ever could have completed on our own
so definitely working together through this initative allowed us to do it.
Basically what we do is we help individual entrepreneurs or
organizations to launch businesses that matter to the world so a lot of
the stuff that we can do with the TIFF Nexus group is to help them to
understand what it actually means to be an entrepreneur
that runs a company.
Now with this building it's the perfect opportunity to create this
hub, this nexus if you will.
The Nexus project wouldn't exist without the support of the
Ontario Media Development Corporation through their entertainment and
creative cluster partnership fund. Through that, we've been able to get
the funding to really bring these diverse creators together - these
different sectors - because they realize the value and the importance
of cross-sector collaboration.
The mixture is fantastic. One of the things that people get stuck on is
talking to people just like them and what happens with there is that the
creative juices stop flowing because you get people that are like-minded
and they stop talking and so when you combine people that are coming from
completely different perspectives. The language that they use, the ideas that
they come up with, the people that they know and are now connected with
are so desperate that you're able to figure out synergies between the two
and for me bringing those groups together is probably the coolest
thing that you can be doing at TIFF.
I really want them to connect and to talk and to see where their
collaborations can go. There's no limit to the future
of the Nexus Project.