Google Maps…yes, google Maps. From the article:

what’s really impressive about the system is the extremely efficient use of crowdsourcing to generate the information. When used on phones with GPS, Google Maps crowdsources huge batches of data on how fast you’re travelling on a particular street, thus measuring traffic for fellow drivers….Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city – every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp – and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions.

Croudsourcing as art? Is it even interactive if people don’t know their data (GPS traces) are being used? I think it’s really interesting how many many people can be used to inform a visualization, some unknowingly passing their data along. This seems like some of the pieces that capture aspects of willing participants and then displays them later.

This reminds me somewhat of the following heatmaps from a game. They show where all the action occurs. the first image shows the global action for all users, and the other shows all of my action.

Anyways, something perhaps a little more related is the Ring Wall:

ring°wall from SENSORY-MINDS on Vimeo.

(WordPress keeps deleting my embedded video!)

I think this is a technical achievement–a giant touchscreen putting the MS Surface to shame–with also a great future potential in “war rooms” like at NASA or other large design projects. I think it’s interesting that the people in the video seem to be playing with the installation, just pushing each screen as they walk by, instead of reading the content there.