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.
Leading the forefront of contemporary fashion design, the twice named 'British Designer of the Year,' Hussein Chalayan, is renowned for his innovative use of materials, meticulous pattern cutting and progressive attitudes to new technology.
Exhibition in Design Museum include ‘Afterwords’ which explores the notion of ‘wearable, portable architecture’ in which furniture literally transforms itself into garments; ‘Airborne’ - bringing the latest LED technology to fashion design with a spectacular dress consisting of Swarovski crystals and over 15,000 flickering LED lights; ‘Before Minus Now’ a dress made of materials used in aircraft construction which changes shape by remote control and ‘Readings’ a dress comprising of over 200 moving lasers presenting an extraordinary spectacle of light.
Engineer and artist Golan Levin pushes the boundaries of whats possible with audiovisuals and technology. In an amazing TED display, he shows two programs he wrote to perform his original compositions.
Kin were approached by de-construct to help them realise an interactive in-store promotion for Tommy Hilfiger. To coincide with their new campaign ‘My Denim, My Music’, Tommy Hilfiger’s aim was to fuse fashion and music: both in their external advertising and through in-store promotions.
Kin developed a large-scale interactive audiocassette, to work as an in-store point of sale unit. 5 new styles of jeans were chosen, and a unique soundtrack was composed for each one by SkinnerBrosMusic. A specifically designed sticker on each pair of jeans instructs the customer to swipe the jeans against the giant cassette to ‘release the music’.
Kin used pre-programmed RFID tags that were placed behind the stickers. An RFID reader mounted inside the cassette reads the unique tag number.
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.
Walk Score help you find a walkable place to live by calculating a Walk Score for any address. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.
Walk Score website also has the most "walkable neighborhoods" area.
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 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 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 (.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.
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.
Six students from Design Products, Industrial Design Engineering and Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art have designed (2005) a landscape of concept furniture derived from the statue-like forms of people sitting, standing or leaning against walls engaged in playing the PlayStation Portable (PSP). about the project
The reactive cube, like a piece of paper or computer monitor screen is a form of visual medium. It is a more visceral kind of screen, designed to transform digital images into apparently physical objects.
It works by projecting a two dimensional image through a three dimensional mass - in this case water mixed with a specially formulated emulsion. The emulsion is composed of micro-sized particles of oil formulated to stay suspended in water. The projected light is captured by the oil and appears to become a virtually real object.
Each version in the series is based on a particular form of interaction. Some cubes respond to sound, another to the force of a person breath and the most recent draws a line around the edge of a person's hand. In each instance the interface has been made as transparent as possible, avoiding technology that comes between the user and their experience of what happens in the cube.
Later versions of the cube were developed in collaboration with Tom Roope of Tomato Interactive and Andy Allenson of Romandson.
Skorpions are a set of kinetic electronic garments that move and change on the body in slow, organic motions. They have anthropomorphic qualities and can be imagined as parasites that inhabit the skin of the host. They breathe and pulse, controlled by their own internal programming. They are not “interactive” artifacts insofar as their programming does not respond to simplistic sensor data. They have intentionality; they are programmed to live, to exist, to subsist. They are living behavioral kinetic sculptures that exploit characteristics such as control, anticipation, and unpredictability. They have their own personalities, their own fears and desires. Skorpions reference the history of garments as instruments of pain and desire. They hurt you and distort your body the same way as corsets and foot binding. They emphasize our lack of control over our garments and our digital technologies. Our clothes shift and change in ways that we do not anticipate. Our electronics malfunction and become obsolete. Skorpions shift and modulate personal and social space by imposing physical constraints on the body. They alter behavior, by hiding or revealing hidden layers, inviting others inside the protective shells of fabric, by erecting breathable walls, or tearing themselves open to divulge hidden secrets.
Greyworld goal is to create works that articulate public spaces, allowing some form of self-expression in areas of the city that people see every day but normally exclude and ignore.
The Source, an eight storey high kinetic sculpture, is the new symbol for the London Stock Exchange. Every morning, millions of viewers around the world will watch the installation come to life, signifying the opening of the London Markets.
Five bins and four benches have been injected with a magic serum of life so that they can break free from their staid and fixed positions to roam free in a public square in Cambridge.
Railings plays on the simple pleasure of picking up a stick and running it along a set of railings to make a lovely "clack-clack-clack" sound. We tuned the railings so that when you ran a stick along them they played "the Girl from Ipanema."
Electroland is a team that creates comprehensive and multi-disciplinary urban projects and scenarios. Electroland is a place where the vast network of electronic impulses and symbolic exchanges became tangible.
This project consists of a luminous field of LED lights embedded into the entry walkway that respond to the presence of visitors; a massive display of lights on the building face that mirror the patterns of the entry; and video displays in the lobby and entry areas.
Electroland has designed a unique Target branded interactive experience adjacent to the newly reopened Rockefeller Center top floor observation decks. The Interactive Breezeway engages pedestrians in an ephemeral interactive encounter where their position and paths are traced by colorful avatars and effects.
This project features two glass pedestrian bridges designed as "Interactive Walkways," each with a field of LED lights embedded in resilient walking surfaces. Sensors detect the presence of people and the system triggers interactive light patterns on the walkway floor.
Computer controlled colored lights fill 81 windows extending over 180 meters at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc.) Patterns are controlled by cellphone by any caller from any location, raising issues concerning private interaction and control of public spaces.
