Metrominuto: The Subway-Inspired Map For Pedestrians

Walkability is a subject many cities are increasingly getting involved with. Our legs are often overlooked when thinking about transport in the city, with municipalities passionately constructing bicycle lanes and roads as far as the eye can see whilst competely forgetting about the pedestrian’s needs. Instead of focusing on these forms of transport, Pontevedra in northwest Spain has been trying for the last 15 years to make their city more walker-friendly. To further improve walkability, they have created a subway-inspired map for pedestrians.

Source: http://popupcity.net/2013/03/metrominuto-the-subway-inspired-map-for-pedestrians/

Swine Flu iPhone application

IntuApps released a new iPhone app that has data on the Swine Flu outbreak.

Mapping and Tracing

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

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).

LOCA - Pervasive surveillance

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

GoCar

GoCar it's a tour guide…a talking car…a trusty co-pilot…and a local on wheels.
GoCar is the first-ever GPS-guided storytelling car - and it's available to rent right now!
Leave your guidebook behind and see the San Francisco, San Diego, Lisbon, Barcelona and Miami most visitors never see.



Your clever talking car navigates and shows you the way – but that's not all. As you enjoy the drive, it takes you to all the best sites and tells the stories that bring these cities to life.
These cars are smart. An on-board computer and a GPS-system do the thinking so you can actually relax and take in the beautiful cities. Best of all, the adventure happens at your pace. You can stop for photos, take detours, grab a coffee or break for lunch.

JotYou

JotYou™ is location based messaging. Send a message to your friends so they get it when they arrive at school or the ballpark or the mall. Make up geo-games. Track a foot race or bicycle race. Stage a road rally with virtual checkpoints, and feed the directions as participants progress. Ever plan to pick up the milk on the way home from work, but drive right by the store and forget? Use JotYou™ to remind yourself as you pass by specified locations.

How it works: You send a message to one person or many people, and specify a delivery time and location using the map on the computer, or an address from your mobile. When they arrive at the location you specify, JotYou™ alerts them by "buzzing" their cell phone, and delivering the message.

LoJo connect

LoJo is a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies.


What is locative storytelling?
Using the bouquet of emerging mobile and location-based technologies (from GPS-enabled mobile phones to interactive online maps), locative storytelling provides multi-media content that enhances a user’s connection to a given place. At its best, this kind of interactive media gives users increased entry points, and more control over, any given story, thereby enabling deeper and more vibrant experiences.

What are some examples?
If you’ve ever been on an audio tour of a museum or a city neighborhood, you’ve experienced locative storytelling. Other examples include Google mash-ups (user-enhanced Google maps that layer location-specific information over area maps) and GPS-based mobile games.

Soundwalks

Soundwalks is an audio tour company, producing audio guides in which the listener is able to step into the life of a narrator as they guide you through their neighborhood streets and local hangouts. Soundwalks mix fiction and reality in a cinematic experience giving the listener the impression of actually being in a film.



Soundwalk has created over 40 walking tours - over 20 in New York alone: from the birth of Hip Hop in the Bronx with Jazzy Jay and Africa Bammbaataa to a memorial walk in Ground Zero with famed author Paul Auster. Recently completed a three-city project for Louis Vuitton in China, featuring Gong Li, Joan Chen, and Shu Qi and a unique sound experience for the Channel Mobile Art Container, featuring the voice of Jeanne Moreau. Soundwalk also produced the official Sony Picture "Da Vinci Code" tour of the Louvre with Jean Reno.

You Are Not Here

You Are Not Here (.org) is a platform for urban tourism mash-ups. It invites participants to become meta-tourists on simultaneous excursions through multiple cities. Passers-by stumble across the curious You Are Not Here signs in the street.





TheYANH street-signs provide the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, a portal for audio-guided tours of one place on the streets of another. Through investigation of these points and with or without the aid of a downloadable map, local pedestrians are transformed into tourists of foreign places. Current walking tours include Baghdad through the streets of New York City and Gaza City through the streets of Tel-Aviv.