The Yellow Arrow (2004) is a global project of public art dedicated to the sharing of local experiences. The initiative began in 2004, in Manhattan, and today has already actions in more than 35 countries and 380 cities around the world. Combining stickers, mobile phones and the interaction of international community, the project transforms urban landscapes into maps revealing personal stories associated to spaces of our everyday life.
At the 2006 Venice Biennial, the project Realtime Roma, developed by the MIT SENSEable City Lab, in association with TIM Italia, presents a system that monitors people, buses and taxis in the city of Rome, showing paths and communicational densities. It allows visualizing data that may help understand urban dynamics in real time. The project’s director Richard Burdett argues that “by revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment”.
Bio Mapping (2004) developed by Christian Nold is a community mapping project in which over the last four years with more than 1500 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops, participants are wired up with a device, which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR). This device is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualizes points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualize the social space of a community.
Mobile Augmented Reality systems allow the visualization of digital information, via a mobile device, about a certain locality, thus “augmenting” the available information. The following photos show us two systems of this sort.
Wikitude AR Travel Guide, prototype developed by Mobilizy to run on Android (Google mobile phone operating system
The above image shows a system with the same mobile augmented reality technology that overlaps real image with software-generated 3D objects/graphics. The system operates through computer vision techniques which allow the reading of black and white squares on the real image. The user points the mobile to something containing the squares and the overlapped digital tri-dimensional which is also, interactive (multi-touch). When the user moves/rotates the mobile he can visualise different perspectives of the 3D object, which can also be animated. Furthermore, the system can detect many simultaneous squares thus allowing him the interaction with the different 3D objects by using the mobile’s multi-touch interface (iPhone).
Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the "Sixth Sense," game-changing wearable tech Pattie Maes is working on newly founded Fluid Interfaces Group, part of the MIT Media Lab. This group aims to rethink the ways in which humans and computers interact, partially by redefining both human and computer. In Maes' world (and really, in all of ours), the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that’s embedded in our environment. By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. The uses of this tech -- from healthcare to home furnishings, warfare to supermarkets -- are powerful and increasingly real
LOCA is an artist-led project on grass-roots, pervasive surveillance using mobile phones. Combined art installation, software engineering, activism, pervasive design, hardware hacking, SMS poetry, sticker art and ambient performance. A person walking through the city centre hears a beep on their phone and glances at the screen. Instead of an SMS alert they see a message reading: "We are currently experiencing difficulties monitoring your position: please wave your network device in the air." Loca engages people by responding to urban semantics, the social meanings of particular places: "You walked past a flower shop and spent 30 mi nutes in the park, are you in love?" Loca: Set To Discoverable enables people to question the networks they populate, and to consider how the trail of digital identities people leave behind them can be used for good or ill. It asks what happens when it is easy for everyone to track everyone, when surveillance is possible using consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks without being routed through a central point?
Loca is a group project by John Evans (UK/Finland), Drew Hemment (UK), Theo Humphries (UK), Mike Raento (Finland) Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica 2008
Mobotag reveals the hidden layers of a city through an active exchange of location based media and text messages via the cellphone. It's collaborative phone tagging of the city. Part virtual graffiti, part walking tour, mobotag creates a spontaneous and easy way for tagging a neighborhood via the cellphone. Send and view messages, images, videos and sounds. See art, read stories, and watch a hidden layer of the city reveal itself. Respond with your media and participate in the creative expression and mapping of your neighborhood. By sending a text message to mobotag, with your city location, you begin a interactive tour of a neighborhood. Using a unique geocoding feature, mobotag tells you what other messages exist in your local area.
Similiar to Mototag, in Flagr you are able to tag a location in a map.
