I have been thinking about what does the radio around us look like. The project “Immaterials: the ghost in the field” is about visualizing the spatial qualities of RFID from Timo Arnallof the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG. The lack of touch feature of RFID has made it “magic” for many system we interact with everyday.They believe that better understanding this invisible feature will help designers to design better interaction.
http://diametunim.com/shashi/nyc_subways/
Looking around, I found a neat infographic showing how many riders ride each train like in New York City, by year, for the past 40 or so years. Having grown up in NYC, I’ve loved the subways since I was young, even though they’re gross. Regardless, I think that these kinds of infographics can be important from both a design and culture point-of-view.
If you look at this one in particular, you can see the evolution of the subway service. While it’s much older than the oldest date recorded, the addition of new lines and the responses to those new lines by the public can be seen, and it becomes kind of a neat history lesson. However, more interestingly, if you look at the variation in usage between certain lines over time, you can start to think about what is happening economically and socially in the neighborhoods that the line falls across. Perhaps there was some sort of economic stimulation in one year by a major corporation moving in, or maybe some sort of migration away happened because of some other reason. That kind of information becomes very interesting because it cues the user to maybe research more, and at the very least think more about the the information that is being presented to them, opposed to letting it come in one ear and go out the other.
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.
SixthSense Technology 1
SixthSense Technology 2
I would like to introduce the next generation wearable computer, SixSense Technology. This technology is invented very recently in the MIT Media lab. The basic idea is not very new such as using projector, virtualizing the real world objects and manipulate it wirelessly on the personal screen. However this video shows that in the near future, our traditional computers can be disappeared. Instead, very small and cheap necklace-shaped device can substitute our computer devices and all we need are our fingers and a white color surface. (this can even be a piece of paper).
I thought this invention is very innovative and has a huge potential. Because this is still the beginning step and has many questions to consider such as “can projector quality(resolution, brightness) be good enough to be a subsutite of a traditional monitor?” or “to make the screen not shakable, should users try not to move at all? because the projector is attached to the users body.) Regarding to our class, this is a good example of augmented reality. As a bridge between the real world and the virtual world, we can design a product or art in this class.
While browsing for essays on the intersection of art and technology, I came upon this course website. Going through the syllabus and schedule, I found the topics interesting as it paralleled discussions of data-based art while introducing programming. It’s interesting to to think about what advantages technology affords us, in both art and in general. And in this case, the emphasis lies on its ability to work and store data.
The course emphasizes the importance of data and memory, as it is the artifact which continues on. One of the powers of computers is the ability to retain large quantities of information, and making it easy accessible. The course website seemed a bit dated with its emphasis on PHP and MySQL but the concept carries. Tying back to the class, this would fall under the category of information visualization and representation.
Some data-driven media art examples were provided:
http://www.theyrule.net/2004/tr2.php – interesting data visualization
http://www.manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm – videos put together by an algorithm
http://parole.aporee.org/ – a dynamic dictionary of a contemporary city
Perhaps these weren’t the most interesting projects I found but it got me to step back for a second to think how all the tools that we have today change the art we make. With access to computers and software, we have new ways to present ideas. In addition to access to information, technology allows for interaction, computation, and also an ability to activate physical spaces.
Inside the AlloSphere
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at data visualizations, so while hunting for something new, I came across the AlloSphere. They call it a “large-scale immersive laboratory”, and it is basically a big dome structure inside of which are large projections with which people can interact in many different ways, such as bodily movements and audiovisual cues. Although it is a massive project in and of itself, it wasn’t created to showcase any one specific visualization; rather, the idea is to allow others with extremely complex data visualization projects (especially of a scientific nature) to utilize this space to navigate information using even more rich and meaningful interactions than we can get just by looking at an average-sized computer screen. Or, as they so aptly put it:
It is also like a violin or a symphony orchestra – an instrument to compose for and to play.
This project stuck out to me as interesting because it shows how increasingly scientists and engineers are partnering with artists and designers to solve some of their most difficult problems, and how such multidisciplinary teams can not only solve individual specific problems using data visualization and interactive media techniques, but to create complex toolkits (in a way) for others to do the same.
Here is the TEDtalk, if you’re interested in learning more:
If you listen to the radio at all, you might have heard an ad from Verizon trying to sell the DROID phone. One of the selling points, among a whole bunch of other jargon, was that “Droid does Augmented Reality”. This is interesting for me because I didn’t realize that AR was part of the general public’s vocabulary. It is hard for me to picture some one hearing that and then rushing out to buy a DROID phone.
I’m posting here the very first Augmented reality system, made by Jun Rekimoto in 1994-1995.
NaviCam (Sorry these aren’t embedded, WordPress cuts out my embed code and the Video insert button just adds this link)
NaviCam doesn’t look like much more than a video barcode reader but it is in the CyberCode demo that we really see what you can do with AR.
I have seen a whole bunch of AR projects, but the fundamentals are very much the same as shown in these demo’s from 15 years ago. His paper The World Through the Computer is also well worth a look. My gut feeling is that the ‘world through a computer’ is only a stepping stone on the road to augmenting the world directly using more ’embodied’ display techniques, whether they be personal projection, holographs, or whatever. I think people are too social to be stuck up in a virtual world with VR glasses or separated from the world via a touchscreen display.