jen

Mobile research: sensors, place and context awareness

This post from the Nokia Conversations blog is particularly relevant to my mobile research this semester, as well as to something I think Scott Fisher was getting at earlier this semester when he mentioned the importance of context to immersion and presence.

One big shift at Nokia is going beyond maps and thinking more about places (locations full of information). We are also going beyond the simple contact card to a more dynamic representation of who people are (people connected to information).

When you start thinking of the mobile device as providing context, you start to think of users projecting who they are, what they are doing, and where they are. But, when you begin to think of what could mobile devices do anonymously, you can see cases where sensor-filled devices can, in aggregate, provide information on traffic, weather, or health patterns.

So, what will a context-aware, sensor-filled future look like? And how will places be transformed when they becomes embedded with context-specific information? I hope to have some answers, as well as examples of what this future might look like by the end of the Spring semester! Stay tuned....

A Selction from ACM Multimedia 2008 Interactive Arts Program

I came across the ACM Interactive Arts Program exhibition page while searching for a Wearable I saw in the Siggraph Art Gallery this year (pictured below). There are a number of nice interactive installations/projects, along the lines of what I would like to think about producing in the iMAP program.

Wearable Forest: "bio-acoustically interacts with a remote forest. The clothing design allows users interact with distant wildlife through the use of a remote controlled speaker and microphone set up over a network."

in a thousand drops: "refracted glances is an interactive audiovisual installation in which participant's movement is tracked by a motion sensing system that maps their flows and locations onto a set of generative musical processes and video animations."
http://www.opusonemusic.net/visualmusic/Aleks/1000/1000.html

Technologies of Perception: digital photography and architecture

BLDGBLOG recently looked at the "architecture" of Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin. Dujardin has taken to modeling fantastical buildings, both physically with cardboard and virtually with SketchUp, and then uses a remix of his photos of actual buildings to create these impossible structures. Dujardin then places these structures within completely believable landscapes, creating the perception of the existence of structurally impossible architecture.

Though this is not technically interactive, I think the question of how we perceive images and other media and how we think about real or constructed in relation to the current digital tools we use is an interesting one.

Synesthesia and Digital Media

Artist and researcher Mitchel Whitelaw has recently published this interesting article, Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals. Whitelaw explores the connection between the perceptual and neurological phenomenon of synesthesia in relation to recent audio-visual-algorithmic art. This thorough article gives a nice overview of some sound/music visualization projects (one embedded below), while examining the limits of making an analogous connection between synesthesia and these forms of generative art.

In the age of ubiquitous digital media, synesthesia is everywhere. In human, neurological form, it is rare: for perhaps three in a hundred people, a stimulus in one sensory modality automatically induces a sensation in another. Auditory-to-visual synesthesia, or “colored hearing” is much rarer still. Yet now this phenomenon is realised, apparently, inside every digital music player, on VJ screens in every club, in robot lightshows. On these screens sound is transformed into visual pattern and form instantly and automatically; an exotic perceptual phenomenon becomes a technically mediated commonplace.

Magnetosphere revisited (audio by Tosca) from flight404 on Vimeo via the teeming void

Entire article at the teeming void