Course

Here's a solution for the GPS networking problem. It's a Boost J2ME enabled mobile phone (prepaid, around $60 at, like..7-11 or Target or Wal-Mart..) and a little application that uses the phone's (and Boost's GPS service) to track the device. The data is then sent to a web service. So — you can do what you will with that location. The great thing is the whole rig actually costs less than a GPS!

More details are here DIY GPS tracking with Mologogo - review.

A similar sort of rig may provide part of the Hunter/Gatherer technology, although I'd expect there to be network delays that my affect the game scenario. I've been told by those in the know that a little J2ME app running on one of these Boost i285 Motorola phones that could read GPS coordinates and toss them over the fence to one's own server isn't a big deal at all.

If there were a budget..

It might also be an enabling technology for MadProphet in some fashion.

The times they are a changing…true for me in a piece of tech I hold dear, my Symbian Smart Phone. Behind me I am leaving my Nokia 3650 and moving on to a Nokia 6682. So I thought it would be a good time to do a comparison. Why are these phones different? What does this new media object mean to my life as an artist?

It started 2002, my first year here @ USC, Scott and the 1st years (now graduates) where into the Nokia 3650 model. Scott had suggested at times during the 511 and elsewhere that all the IMD students ought to have them.

I didn’t pick mine up until late June of 2003, back then t-mobile seemed to have a good selection of current devices, and I got the 3650 for $199.00. It arrived shortly there after; this was my first real mobile media device; my phones before that where of the bland realms of early 2G technologies. I used the address books and made phones calls in that Dialectic LCD world of greens and grayish blacks, no more accept the occasional log access.

The 3650 quickly brought me to a new land. I was ripping A/V representations of life in the blur as it passed me by. I didn’t have a car then, so as I rode the Metro transit system around town and I’d glean from the experience.


Then at home I’d mix the experience on my Mac using a rudimentary tool like i-Movie.

My Lifelog database grew daily, I felt more involved with life, and had a keen sense of my agency within the world; the constant gleaning helped me to test the borders of my interaction with the great system that is totality.

Eventually it grew buggy and I dissatisfied with it’s audio/video quality; my creative burst died down, as I settled into the realities of a first generation smart phone. Smart, I would say, was not the word for it.

I tecnholusted and waited, as I saw new models sprout from Nokia, the series 60 was tempting.

Meantime, this past spring I began to hear about Flash Lite, a mobile version of Macromedia’s Flash that has so dominated multimedia web-development in recent years. I had been a junkie for so long I felt like it was destiny.

It was then after I saw my content on a mobile device for the first time that I realized that the next year of my life or more would be dedicated to exploring rich mobile media and it’s future potential.

I got a call from JAMDAT mobile to do some QA Testing for them. It was there I got to see the true state of mobile media; it was in the gutter rolling in piss poor content pushed by buzz-laden lackeys. I knew I needed to do something about it.

I read more Blog entries than I can remember trying to evaluate a new device, all just as buggy. It wasn’t until the 6670 showed it’s head that people began to talk about the bugs finally being resolved and by then I was completely broke.

The there was the 6680. All the reviews I could find were written in praise, but what need do I have for two way video calls? Sounds cool, but I felt a feature that is a little premature. So I went the Nokia 6682, basically the 6680 without the front mounted 640x480 camera for video calls.


What a glorious device, the OS runs wonderfully, Almost seamless. It’s increased performance and quality is awesome. I hope it to will act as it predecessor, as an activator in my life, a tool for expression, research, and socialization; bringing me closer to my dream of a portable total media device that can record all of my varied expressions and experiences.

Nokia 3650:

32-bit ARM RISC processor
Processor speed: not disclosed by manufacturer.
4MB RAM built-in
GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900
Bluetooth v1.0
Symbian 6.0 (Series 60)
4.59 Ounces
5.10 Inches
WAP 1.0
TFT color LCD, 12 bit, 4096 colors.
176 x 208 Screen Res
Flash Lite 1.1 compatiable

Nokia 6682:

220 MHz CPU
10MB RAM built-in
GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/1800/1900
Bluetooth v1.2
Symbian 8.0 (Series 60)
WAP 2.0
1.3 megapixel (1280 x 960 pixels) camera
4.62 Ounces
4.28 Inches
TFT color LCD, 16bit, 262,000 colors
176 x 208 Screen Res
Flash Lite 2.0 Compatiable

So you want to make a prophet? He is simple recipe I came up with:

Ingredients:
1 part baby doll
2 parts old linen pants
1 part Oven baked modeling clay
1 part Acrylic Paint

Directions:
Mix, sculpt, sew, paint and add salt to taste.

I blogged this over on my techkwondo research toaster

Google + Local + Mobile!

Google spreads like warm jam over the application idiolects in which it's almost certain people want to know what they want to know..on the go..so they can flow..

Technorati Tags: cartography, Google, locative media, mapping, maps, mobile, MVNO

Stumbled across this Google Maps..thing. It's not quite collaborative mapping, but it has a draw.

Sightseeing with Google Satellite Maps

I've added it to my Google Maps Mash-Up Bibliography. (I know, I know, other sites catalog Google Maps Map Things. I'm not playing the "been-here-first" game — I just want something that I can taxonomize and hierarchicize and annotate as befits my own brain.)

The Talmudic 'Why do I blog this' — the blog meat, as it were — are on my research blog.

Technorati Tags: collaborative cartography, Google Map Hack, pervasive media

"Galileo is a satellite-based positioning network similar to -- but more accurate than -- the well-known Global Positioning System (GPS)...Galileo is set to be operational by 2008. The European Union, in an attempt to encourage innovative uses of Galileo, holds an annual Galileo Masters competition, and this year's winners have a distinctly green aspect."

WorldChanging article by Jamais Cascio

BBC Article
European Masters Competition Site
VU Log site

Arctic Map Vanishes, and Oil Area Expands
today's NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Maps matter. They chronicle the struggles of empires and zoning boards. They chart political compromise. So it was natural for Republican Congressional aides, doing due diligence for what may be the last battle in the fight over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to ask for the legally binding 1978 map of the refuge and its coastal plain.

It was gone. No map, no copies, no digitized version.

The wall-size 1:250,000-scale map delineated the tundra in the biggest national land-use controversy of the last quarter-century, an area that environmentalists call America's Serengeti and that oil enthusiasts see as America's Oman. The map had been stored behind a filing cabinet in a locked room in Arlington, Va. Late in 2002, it was there. In early 2003, it disappeared. There are just a few reflection-flecked photographs to remember it by.

All this may have real consequences. The United States Geological Survey drew up a new map. On Wednesday, the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee passed a measure based on the new map that opened to drilling 1.5 million acres of coastal plain in the refuge.
-------
The "new" map referred to in the article dates to 1978 which explains (but does not justify) how it was never digitized. How will newer mapping technologies (mobile GPS, etc) affect boundaries and boundary making?

Posted on the NetPublics Blog


Quote:

video ipod review:

Last month I was ready to upgrade to a new iPod from my third generation model, but the rumor sites began to make noises that an upgrade to 80gb was in the works so I held off.

After the announcement of the video iPod last week I decided that even though I was a little disappointed by the size of the drive, a bigger one would be unlikely before January so I ordered a 60 gb unit from Apple.

I was supposed to get my iPod tomorrow, but FedEx delivered the unit a day early.

Read on for my review of the video iPod after half a day of playing with it.

Technorati Tags: mobile media, pervasive media

So here's what I have looked into in terms of information sources to add complexity/depth/etc. to our story:

Weather: It can be done, but it may need to pull real-time data from an additional source, I'm not sure.

Speech Recognition: It can be done, and I am quite happy to mess around and learn how to use Sphynx. My only question is whether this doll will really be used in a situation where it will overhear any language at all. Perhaps we could design it so that the user could comment to the doll about its prophecies, and it could use mediocre speech recognition to retort with more prophecies.

Flight patterns: I didn't immediately see any master list, but we could compile one using flight tracker sites.

Earthquake info: There is pretty close to real time data out there, but if we don't want to deal with that we could use data from a previous day, month, or year. What about data from a century ago?

Transportation schedules: Found the list - we could extrapolate the timed locations of trains/buses. Also perhaps there's a way to incorporate traffic alerts, etc.

Tides: Charts easily available.

Near Earth Objects: Impending doom from the heavens. Data is not real time, but these things don't move too much relative to us from day to day, so it probably isn't a problem.

And on an unrelated note, when I searched Google for "comet tracker" this was the top hit. Can anyone say "Big Brother"?

Earthquake info: http://neic.usgs.gov/, http://www.iris.edu/seismon/

Metro Schedules: http://www.mta.net/riding_metro/riders_guide/planning_trip.htm

Other LA transport resources: http://www.traffic.com/Los-Angeles-Traffic/Los-Angeles-Traffic-Road-Construction-Airports-Bridges-Tolls-Transit.html

Tide info: http://www.saltwatertides.com/dynamic.dir/californiasites.html

Near Earth Object info: http://131.114.72.13/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo

From my NetPublics blog

While traditionally maps may have been a a form of visual knowledge generated by and for Imperial ideology, new practices of information technology begin to open up the practice of mapping to civic society.

My tracklog and my social network amount to a marketer's dream. To know where I am, is to know how to sell [to] me. This has led critics like Holmes and Crandall, to accuse locative media of being, in Andreas Broekman's terms , the avant garde of the Control Society.

Yet, as Deleuze states, "there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons".

1) Speech Recognition
Here's a program developed by Carnegie Mellon. It's free to use, plus it was used by some good friends of mine on their thesis project at Carleton a year ago: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php

2) Weather
Here are some research papers on using GPS for weather measurements. I'm not clear on how much of the data you need to do such a thing is from a source other than the GPS satellites:
http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/related_papers/Kuo361.pdf
http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-abstract&issn=1520-0477&volume=077&page=0005
http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/related_papers/Rocken367.pdf

From Regine:


Quote
Yokai Meets Media Art:

Yokai is a type of creatures in Japanese folklore such as Oni, Nopperabou, Yuki-onna, Rokurokubi, etc. They are not ghosts but mysterious freak creatures. (By the way, one of the best places to start learning about Yokai is Shigeru Mizuki's cartoons including Ge Ge Ge No Kitaro.)

A group of Japanese artists called Air Brake creates new media art installations that are inspired by the idea of Yoikai. In 2002, they made Yamiwarashi, which people wear (like they are haunted from behind) and makes it hard for them to see. If the wearer doesn't move, he can't see anything at all. But if he starts walking or running, he can see. Devices embedded in it provide this functionality.

[Yamiwarashi. Must keep moving unless you want to go back into the darkness.]

A video clip is available here.

More recently, the artists made Notorigaeshi. When people wear (or "haunted" by ) Notorigaeshi, they will experience difficulty talking. Every time the wearer says something, Notorigaeshi says it back to him with a 10-millisecond delay, forcing him to listen to and think about what he says.

[Notorigaeshi.]

I blog this because the backpack style is evocative of the ideas we're chewing on for the CTIN499 project

For awhile there, I stopped getting invited to all the cool beta tests, but I think I'm getting back in the loop. Here's one I'm having fun with — it's called Platial. It's still in Preview Mode at this point, and all usual caveats about browser compatibility and such-all apply. Simple approach — tag locations and share them. Google Maps is on the back end, like all the other cool mash-ups. This one is distinctive in that you actually author the represented locales, rather than having data pulled from some other data source, like Craig's List or some crimes database.

As reported by the Dessert Topping of Blogs, Pasta and Vinegar, Nicolas Nova notes the appearance of a Journal paper about Can You See Me Now?, a paper to be published in Transactions of CHI:

Can You See Me Now? by Steve Benford, Andy Crabtree, Martin Flintham, Adam Drozd, Rob Anastasi and Mark Paxton + Nick Tandavanitj, Matt Adams and Ju Row-Farr.

This article is a very good milestone, it’s a journal paper that accounts the experience they had with the game Can You See Me Now?.

It think that this paper should be considered as a seminal article about ethnographical analysis of a location-based game. Besides, after research projects like Pirates!, AR Quake and BotFighters, it’s one of the most important early example in the field. It also describes interesting aspects about uncertainty arising from the use of GPS and WiFi, which is a topic we are working on with Fabien. They somehow use some quantitative indexes like packet loss intervals + periods loss; we’re considering to move further by using other measures and correlate them with task performance or communication frequency/quality in CatchBob!

Glowlab, based in Brooklyn, my favorite glowing labs and fine purveyors of things locative, urban and psychogeographic, is having an epic eight (8!) week festival at Art Interactive in Cambridge. It will be running from October 14 - December 11.

BTW, Glowlab produced the phenomenal and exemplar location-tagging app One Block Radius that makes Google Maps drool with envy.

Glowlab, a Brooklyn-based psychogeography network presents Open Lab at Art Interactive. During this festival and exhibition curated by Christina Ray, more than twenty artists will research the effects of the urban environment on emotion and behavior by leading a series of public events.

Each weekend of this unique festival and exhibition, several Glowlab artists will be "in-residence" at Art Interactive to lead interactive public events in the neighborhood. These include a wearable trash workshop, a laughing bike tour, a lesson in text-messaging the sky, and an informal conversation with a suitcase.

While artists lead projects in the neighborhood's public spaces, the gallery is transformed into a working lab complete with video and web-based works and project documentation in the form of maps, photos and other materials.

This guy is your engine-avatar to finding out, well..where you are. Or where you are in the IP-Network universe.

GeoBytes

http://www.cenriqueortiz.com/weblog/Mobility/?permalink=Mobile-Data-Usage.html

This makes allot of sense to me. Most of the mobile market seems to be patched with mediocre content, wallpaper and ringtones etc. After working for JAMDAT, I know very few people there go home after work and use the products they offer. I didn't want to either, I was so sick of crappy handsets by the end of the day, I didn't want to go near them.

This passage was particularly inspiring to me:

You know, handsets are first and most, a communication apparatus, a social device, to connect and interact with other people - friends, family, work. It is not only about ring-tones, and access to weather or stocks, and so on. This is why email and IM and voice! and blogs (i.e. communication) are the killer apps. We need to continue to improve, innovate how people communicate. And there is a lot of innovation to be done, to enhance the people-to-people communication (and social) experience.

Claritis is a remarkably odd yet not unexpected approach to adding marketing to the locative media mix. They're not explicitly part of the locative media innovators tribe..or are they? Enter your zipcode and find out what your home neighborhood's demographic mix is..

Curiously, and somewhat reassuringly, the neighborhood where I live in LA and the one where I have an apartment in New York City both came up as American Dream, Bohemian Mix, Money & Brains, Urban Achievers, Young Digerati. Seems I haven't changed.

Claritis

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=10650&filter=
According to a Telephia study, 36 percent of mobile games were free to download. Unsurprisingly, puzzle and strategy games have the largest market share, with a 27 percent share of revenue and a 48 percent share of all free downloads. A second study sponsored by I-play indicates that American gamers are more likely to show off their mobile games to friends and are more competitive about gaming than their European counterparts.

This project is designed to collect historical and real-time freeway data from freeways in the State of California in order to compute freeway performance measures.

At this year's World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures event in London U.K., Schuyler Earle, co-author of Mapping Hacks, speaks in this one minute video clip on the Global Free Map Movement. Using the metaphor of Wikipedia, he describes how (self/community appointed?) experts in a given field would theoretically manage geodata for given regions of space.

1 Meg Quicktime movie: Download file

wikipedia + google maps = placeopedia

from Kim Pallister.

So this morning I read that there is a wildfire somewhere northwest of Los Angeles. Not being completely savvy with the geography of this area (hell, I'm barely savvy with the geography of my home state), I went looking for a map of where this fire was and how big it was and where it was headed. Most news stories and even fire alert sites provided only place names. Then to my delight I happened upon this site by the California Fire Alliance. It's a free online tool to let you see where wildfires are (or were) and...well, I guess plan trips around them. I'm not sure. Either way, I felt that this would definitely answer my question. Oh foolish me. I tried very hard to figure out how to use this tool, but with limited success. The best answer I could get was this:



I must say I'm hard pressed to come up with a less clear legend system than theirs. Triangles of the same color but slightly different sizes? Anyway, if anyone can figure out how to get this tool to show the actual size of the fire please let me know. Here is a pdf of their brochure for the site.

Here are my notes from our class brainstorming on a final project for Location Based Mobile Media: Maps, Games and Stories this Monday. I emailed out the Wiki URL in a separate email for further work.

The US and Chinese governments are collaborating on a GPS tracking system to monitor panda movements in a reserve, in remote Shaanxi province. Panda sexual activity, as there is little known of their sexual habits, seems to be the focus, apparently it is very difficult to breed them in captivity.

"Tracking them with advanced technology and observing their sex activities might help us find ways to avoid their extinction," an official said.

China's scientists have come up with a series of more or less surprising ideas for improving panda reproduction, including showing them sex education videos.

Marko Ahtisaari is another one of those thought-leaders sitting high on the technorati pyramid of tribal alphas. Here he offers an interesting take on what the world of mobile wants to look like from one designer's perspective.

Blogging Over Las Vegas

Geominder creates location-based reminders, anchored to physical, geographic places.

hen arriving at a marked location, the system can play an alarm and display a stored text note or a voice note previously associated to that location. For example: "When I arrive at the office, remind me to review next week's schedule", "At home remind me to call Dave"

Geominder uses mobile network's cell id information and doesn't require an extra GPS device.

It also stores text notes or voice notes, can use audio alarms or silent notifications, locations can be learned and tuned.

Cell carriers don't often make the location of cell towers publicly accessible, which means that customers won't know if they'll get good coverage (it's also a pain from the point of view of "location-based storytelling" since knowing cell location would be a big step towards generating automated location-awareness).

Cell Phone Reception and Tower Search, however, has a "searchable databases of over 117,000 cell phone tower locations registered with the FCC, and over 16,000 cell phone carrier comments submitted voluntarily from real customers using their service all over the U.S."

Some of the towers in L.A. are amusingly disguized to look like Palm trees and stuff. I spotted one on my down Washington the other day. I think I'm gonna start a new set to my Flickr photostream dedicated to cell scavenging.

Here's the whiteboarded notes from our most recent Location-Based Storytelling class. Towards a final project, perhaps?



(click for a blow-up, under "all sizes" on Flickr).

Just a reminder that we'll be meeting at the Center for Land Use Interpretation for our first make up class this Friday. For those who can, we'll be meeting at Justin's at 3:30pm, which is nearby CLUI, and walking over. Or, alternatively, just meet at CLUI by 3:45.

The CLUI main office is located at:
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 839-5722 / Fax: (310) 839.6678

See you then, there.

Marco Susani, Director Advanced Concepts Group at Motorola, had some interesting words on what he calls "Aura Networks" that captures succinctly the nature of networks that are more like social meteorology than the tinkertoy network graphs we're used to. It's not a new conversation on Susani's part. It's a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussions about what mobile communities "look like." It's nice to have the actual audio of the presentation.

You can listen to his presentation from the Ars Electronica Festival website

Free, yes, free J2ME game developers book from Jason Lam.
Altough I have yet to review it myself; from the looks of thinks this looks a pretty striaght forward guide to making your own shooter for a hand-held device.

Download it!!

Go ahead try it, the mobile field is way open, and the best game makers out there suck, and so do thier games (aka JAMDAT); you can rule like Nintendo in the old skool!

A recent paper on the old favorite, capture the flag (or steal the bacon if you grew up in my neighborhood) using cellphones, only in a clever lotek fashion. (Which isn't to say all lotek is clever, but oftentimes if it does the same job as well as or better than the hitek, it's not only clever but fashionable.)

Capture the Flag: A Multiplayer Online Game for Phone Users

This paper explores the concept of using smart phones to facilitate pervasive mixed reality, location-based, physical and social gaming. The interaction and communication between the virtual and physical worlds are explored and studied using a mixed reality version of the capture-the-flag game. In this game, players from two different paradigms, virtual and real, compete and collaborate in a social gaming environment using mobile devices and network system.
(…)
Unlike Human Pacman and ARQuake where players are equipped with head-mounted displays and complicated wearable equipment, players can move freely over wide outdoor area with true mobility and minimal hardware.

The basic goal of our smart phone-based CTF is to capture the opponents’ flag by acquiring it from their base and bringing it to the home base.
(…)
There are two player roles; smart phone players play as Knights while online players play as Guides through desktop PCs and they are connected via the Internet. The Knights whose positions are tracked via Global Positioning Unit (GPS) have to set her team’s “castle” in the beginning of the game by placing their own physical flag (a Bluetooth embedded device) on the ground. Once done, a virtual castle and a flag appear at the corresponding location in the Guides’ 3D map and in Knights’ smart phone interface. (…) Communication between various players using text messaging is an ongoing process throughout the game.

Lost Phone: 18,900 Google Entries
by Emily Conrad

I lost my cellphone in the back of New York City taxi. Friday, September 2nd, around 1 in the morning. This must happen all the time.

Listen to the cellphone journey here.

This audio is about twelve minutes long, edited down from over an hour.
And the truth is, taxi driver's do not get that many fares, even on a friday night.
Feel free to scan through if you get bored.
Some highlights include the cabbie jamming out to T100 (a cheesy NYC station), and a group on there way to Brandy's, and a few bits of other beligerency.

[via Glowlab]

Networked Performance has a great interview with our own Kazys Varnelis and Robert Sumrell on the topics of new media, history and architecture. A recommended read!

Kazys Varnelis from the Annenberg's Networked Publics research lab forwarded me this link that he's found on Archinect. The Digital Derive project will be shown at the M-City exhibition (curator: Marco De Michelis) in Kunsthaus Graz, Oct 01, 2005 - Jan 08, 2006.

"Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity... Digital Derive (re)presents the city displayed simultaneously in the Kunsthaus Graz and in a publicly accessible website... The Real-Time City Map will register and visually render the volume and geographic source of cell phone usage in Graz, thus showing a different layer in the use and experience of the city. Furthermore the users of A1 Mobilkom Austria in Graz will be tracked anonymously by 'pinging' their cell phones as they move through the city. The record of this movement will be collected, processed and finally displayed as set of dynamic traces showing their paths through the city on the same map..."

The rendering of the peaks & valleys of cell phone usage here is reminscent of some oceanographic map of a deep sea trench, as if the city were drowned in a tsunami of spectrum (immersive media?).

As astonishing as this image is, the Digital Derive project arguably reproduces a static notion of urban space by using a conventional GIS overlay aesthetic. As Ali Sant notes in a text she has written about her "Trace" project, a collaboration with Ryan Shaw, entitled "Redefining the Basemap":

"Current collaborative mapping projects using locative media technologies have often overlooked the conventions of the basemap as a site for reinvention. Although these projects imagine alternative organizations of urban space through the way it is digitally mapped, they remain bounded by datasets that reinforce a Cartesian and static notion of urban space."

Thus reading the Digital Derive through Ali, perhaps the next big step for locative projects interested in mapping how a space is actually "practiced" will be to deform the base map into a kind of cartogram of cell usage.

Here I consider those famous "purple maps" of the last US election as deeply inspirational.

Grand Finale_Yellow Arrow: The Secret New York

Yellow Arrow: The Secret New York is a public art project that
celebrates the extraordinary details of the city that often pass
unnoticed. Upon encountering a Yellow Arrow, the public participates by
calling 212.201.2005 from mobile phones to hear an audio message that
tells a secret story about the location where the arrow points.

This Saturday marks the Grand Finale with 20 Yellow Arrow sculptures
visible across Manhattan and Brooklyn from 12-8 pm, at places like:
Union Square, Chinatown, The Lower East Side, East Village, Lower
Manhattan, Williamsburg and DUMBO. This is is a fantastic opportunity
for people to experience some of the most compelling content of the
summer in one single day.

Over the summer the project has touched a lot of people in all 5
boroughs and there are some very fun stories about bringing it all
together. Creators of the project will be leading two behind-the-scenes
tours to share these anecdotes and insights. Tour 1_Lower Manhattan
meets at Battery Park at 12 pm and will visit 5 nearby Yellow Arrows.
Tour 2_East Village meets at corner of Ave. B and E. 7th St. at 6:00 pm
and will visit 6 Yellow Arrows, grab dinner in the area and head to the
after-party.

The day-long installation and tours will be followed by a celebration at
the Lotus Lounge (35 Clinton St at Stanton), with drink specials, video
projection and a sound installation on the street.

Grand Finale
Downtown Manhattan, Williamsburg and DUMBO
12-8 pm
Full map available at: http://www.yellowarrow.net/GrandFinale

Tours
Tour 1_Lower Manhattan 12 pm at Battery Park
Tour 2_East Village 6 pm at corner of Ave. B and E. 7th St

Grand Finale Party
Lotus Lounge
35 Clinton Street at Stanton, Lower East Side, Manhattan
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=35++Clinton+Street+Manhattan+NY&spn=0.018447,0.033350&hl=en
9p-?

From Nicolas Nova's Pasta and Vinegar is a post reporting on a recent paper by Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, Learning in the Mobile Age Conference (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, April 28–30, 2005), titled “Seeing” one another onscreen and the construction of social order in a mobile-based augmented public space: The uses of a geo-localized mobile game in Japan.

The article is about how location awareness of others in mobile game Mogi Mogi is important to create affordances for social encounters.

The ‘onscreen encounter’ in which the protagonists are able to perceive their respective icons on the screen map and to share that perception configures a form of encounter peculiar to context-aware cooperative devices like Mogi.

Here's a unique mobile cameraphone game that I might describe as Mobile Social Software game if I weren't taking advice from Ben that we put the "social software" meme to bed and just make social software. Dan and Frank and Kevin cooked this up for Ubicomp2005 as part of their contribution to the workshop on ubiquitous computing, games and entertainment I organized with Ian Smith and Nicolas Ducheneaut.

Cross posted from Regine's entry: Superstar Tokyo

Superstar is a multiplayer photo-based game designed for Ubicomp 2005, Tokyo. The game is free, and open for anyone with a phonecam and self-portrait Puri Kura stickers of themselves.

The game uses Japanese Puri Kura stickers as a starting point for an experiment in social networks, automated phonecam image analysis, and urban visual culture.
The goal is to see and be seen, using tiny images woven into the fabric of Tokyo streetlife.

To play, place your own stickers (with a star on it to recognize participants) wherever you want and collect the stickers of other players by shooting them with your phonecam. Whenever a player snaps a Superstar sticker both players earn points.

A link is then created between the two players. From this point on, any time either player earns points (by shooting a new sticker or by having their sticker shot) the other one will also earn points (though not as many).

Superstar thus builds a network of connections that forms a social, pyramid scheme. Successful players will be the ones that forge connections with other active players.

All the sites mentioned here are worth (RSS) subscribing to if you're taking "Location-Based Mobile Media: Maps, Games and Stories", or if you just interested in locative media.

* "Angermann2" blog from new media art world (don't be put off by the somewhat avante-gard design aestehtic), about AI, architecture, art, audio, brainstorm, cartography, computing, conference, default, ethnography, hacking, haptic, information design, location-awareness, mobile, mundane, retro, social, space-place, spatial, swarming, urban, walking, wearing, wi-fi, and stuff.

* "We Make Money Not Art" a G-R-E-A-T site which looks at locative media as new media art, (for more specific focuss on location-based wireless select the "We Make Money Not Art locative tag" )

* "Networked Performance" http://www.turbulence.org/blog/ a site looking at locative media, augmented reality, distributed performance, environmental theatre, pervasive play, immersive gaming, telepresence?...??? (once again for more specific focuss on location-based wireless select the "Networked Performance locative tag" on the right side of the screen)

* "In duce" an extremely comprehensive site on all things locative related

* del.icio.us is a bookmark sharing application, that is useful for all kinds of things, here i've included the link to the "del.icio.us locative tag"

* "Elastic Space" Timo Arnall's blog of things locative. (Kazys says "his Flickr stream is equally engaging")

* "Purse Lips Square Jaw" a research blog by Anne Galloway, concerned with urban space and mobile/ubiquitous technology

"pasta and vinegar"http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/
Nic Nova's blog, exhaustively researched. The place to go for anything locative

"informationlab"
Auke Touwslager's research blog, concerned with locative public space and social network mapping

"fish are people too"
Andrew Wilson and Gilbert Roberts' blog: "What will happen when we've all got these gadgets (the next mobile phone you buy will probably be one) and how and why will it happen? "

Urban Blogs
Thoughts on mobility and urbanism from Anthony Townsend, a pre-eminent researcher now working out of Institute for the Future.

Anti Mega
Chris Heathcote is a researcher working for Nokia's Insight and Foresight group.

This just in from the TOC (Table of Contents) service through the Association of Computing Machinery's Digital Library (semi-recommended point through which one may access and search published proceedings, articles, etc., from ACM meetings, newsletters, etc.) — Computers In Entertainment, some new articles.
Click here to see the TOC.
Here are two that seem interesting:

Creating entertainment applications for cellular phones
Paul Coulton, Omer Rashid, Reuben Edwards, Robert Thompson

Pervasive games: bringing computer entertainment back to the real world
Carsten Magerkurth, Adrian David Cheok, Regan L. Mandryk, Trond Nilsen

The Drop: pragmatic problems in the design of a compelling, pervasive game
Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Anthony LaMarca

Nokia launched this phone in Germany this month (read the article), looks allot like the i-mate JASJAR just anounced (read the article) , both devices also run on the new Microsoft operating system Windows Mobile 5.0

It sure will be fun when handsets like this become available in north america, the development possibilities seem endless. I am convinced 3G adoption and the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) will have great impacts on the way we learn, percieve and work. It stinks to be in north america when our Euro and Asian buddies get to play in our tomorrow today. While we wait for 3G the rest of the modern world is already looking to 4G. I guess I should be happy that the major bugs will hopefully be ironed out by the time UMTS really hits us here.

I wonder if Apple has a Nokia i-book in the works? I would be nice if the enviornment reflection worked so that the virtual world of the mobile would match our wired home space; a mobile telepresence of our home dataspace, if you will.

The first two chapters of The Power of Maps lay some important ground work for understanding how location is a framework that tells stories. When Wood describes the way maps, as renderings of geographic locations are subject to the vagaries of representation, he is reminding us that maps are authored, and as such are but one way of telling a story. Thinking of maps as stories told may seem a bit 15th century. But, as Wood works hard to convey, the actually steps by which a map is realized is entirely authorial — even scientific maps, drawn from satellite data. This is why he goes through all the trouble of describing the politics, discussions and debates surrounding what technology was to be used in early satellites. We all probably understand that one technology may create a different kind of visual representation than another.




Think, for instance, of the difference in image acuity between a typically low-end cameraphone versus a 7 megapixel digital camera. One bit of technology captures an image in a different way. It's difficult to say which is better — it depends on the purpose to which the technology is deployed. Many people would prefer a cameraphone because of the convenience, novelty, ability to share photos easily, etc. If one expects to capture an image for use in print, a high-end film or digital camera is required. For the researchers developing the technology for mapping the earth from satellites, there are similar tradeoffs to be made, and each decision is the result of a kind of story — of the discussions amongst colleagues, vying for influence, playing their political hand so as to obtain advantage or mitigate conflict. Each one of those decisions, when taken in sum, made it so that one kind of representation of the earth occured rather than another. And the point to come away from beyond that is that the particular maps we see from satellites, for example, could have been different from what they are. Which reminds us that these satellite maps may well have been otherwise.

As other related examples of this notion, check out my entry on Ars Electronica exhibits particularly the Milk Project, Life: A User's Manual and Wikimap Linz.