Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Zaragoza - Digital Mile









In December William J. Mitchell presented The Zaragoza ‘Digital Mile’ (detailed info) to the students at the Bartlett.The Zaragoza ‘Digital Mile’ will incorporate digital media into everyday aspects of the public realm to make places that respond to their users; accommodate multiple activities; and provide stories, information and services to the people of the city. It will question how can technology enhance public use and enjoyment? Can it make space more productive, or meaningful? What types of urban forms best accommodate digital media? Can it create a public realm that is more flexible and adaptable to different users, activities, or moods? How do you develop content for the media and who should manage it?
All of the spaces, parks and buildings on the Digital Mile include free, public wireless connectivity as well as open access to the digital systems and responsive media elements located along the Mile. Digital systems are programmable according to users’ wishes and thus facilitate experiences on the Digital Mile.
These are concentrated along the pedestrian path called the Paseo del Agua. The WATER WALL is an interactive fountain where people can digitally control the streams of water. With a command – by jumping into the water or sending a message through an electronic device – the water can start and stop or change in pressure. This is a monumental urban element like a canal running through the city, but twisted into a vertical plane so that people can experience it from a distance as a landmark or interact with it directly. The intelligent streetlight system creates a distinctive atmosphere along the Mile by changing color or intensity in response to the time of day, demands for use, or artistic desires. In tandem, digital street furniture - - like cafĂ© tables, bus stops, and signage — display information about such practical matters as menus, bus arrivals, or the location of available parking spaces. These digital systems are intended to make moving through the Digital Mile a seamless, entertaining, and instinctive experience. Two event places, Portillo and Almozara, anchor the Digital Mile and feature responsive digital elements to support different activities and enhance users’ perceptions of the urban environment.
Affixed to the facades of buildings, URBAN PIXELS delineate the edges of the Zaragoza Digital Mile from the rest of the city. When viewed from the air or from the ground by pedestrians, drivers, and train passengers, this ‘light’ footprint intervention works synchronously or asynchronously to emphasize different moods or zones along the Digital Mile. Each pixel unit includes a solar charging unit and can be programmed wirelessly.
The MEMORY WALK walk makes visible the way people travel through the city by recording pedestrians’ steps across a space. Every time a footstep falls on a digital paver, the paver emits an additional increment of light. As people cross the pavement, paths of light are illuminated where people tread the most; untread areas emit no light. Thus, people become aware of the traces their movements leave upon the surfaces of the Digital Mile.
DIGITAL AWNINGS are screens that can rotate in four directions: up, down, left, and right. The movement of the awnings is controlled by either pre-programming, a command by mobile phone, in response to people’s physical movements, or in the service of a collective special event. This system enhances the experience of the Digital Mile by displaying abstract, impressionistic, provocative, personalized, or integrative content, including information and images related to Zaragoza’s history or people’s real-time activities in other areas of the Digital Mile.




Dey Street Tunnel - James Carpenter Design Associates





The Dey Street Tunnel is a pedestrian tunnel that connects Fulton Street with the World Trade Center subway stations. For this project, a design by James Carpenter Design, Kinecity investigated several interactive solutions for LEDs in a space without natural light. The physical space animates as people walk through the tunnel at different rates, at different densities and from different directions.
The LED lighting is integrated into only one wall of the tunnel through apertures in the polished stainless steel walls. The other walls, a combination of highly reflective and matt surfaces, create an illusion of multiple spaces and depths inside them.



Interactive Design: Kinecity Llc

Interactive Applets: Martin Wattenberg

Electronic Textiles: Loop.pH





Rachel Wingfield and Mattias Gmachi work together as Loop.pH, a design and research studio which investigates and creates new surfaces and structures. Their reactive surfaces are often inspired by natural forms and processes, expressed as both 2-D and 3-D forms using light, colour and electroluminescent technology. The pictures above show Digital Dawn, a light reactive window blind.
Using printed electroluminescent technology it emulates the process of photosynthesis, reacting to changes in ambient light levels. As the space becomes darker the blind becomes brighter, maintaining a balance in the light level. This concept of light-reactive textiles was explored further in Light Sleeper, a silent alarm clock which is a set of bedding containing electroluminescent material.


Similar technology was used in Blumen, an electronic wallpaper display. The wallpaper is built up from a number of addressable cells forming a repeating pattern across the surface. Each cell can be addressed individually and when connected to sensors Blumen becomes an animated pattern, emerging and altering in response to its environment. Temporal Light takes a similar approach, embedding the electroluminescent material into tiles which act as pixels in the display.
Also interesting is Biowall, a hand-woven 3-dimensional structure created by bending fibreglass rods into rings which are then woven into dodecahedra. These in turn are joined together to form lace-like walls of any size. The finished structure is self-supporting while maintaining some of the flexibility of a textile.

Light-transmitting Concrete






The light-transmitting concrete created by LiTraCon is created by embedding thousands of optical glass fibres into concrete. These fibres lie parallel to each other forming a pathway for light to travel from one side of the concrete block to the other. In theory, a wall might be several metres thick without any loss of light between surfaces. As the light reaches the other side of the block unchanged, sharp shadows can be seen through the wall.
The strength of the concrete is not affected by the glass fibres which make up only 4% of the content of the block and the concrete blocks can be used for both load-bearing and interior walls as well as pavements. If the walls are built facing east or west the light at sunset or sunrise will reach the glass fibres at a lower angle increasing the light intensity.


Thursday, March 8, 2007

Interactive led wall

JamesClar.com "Flexgrid"

Interactive Touchless Table in Tokyo

Interactive Floor @ Vision City

Liquid 2.0_ interactive animal

Breathing building 3GATTI.COM architecture

Dune 4.0_ interactive landscape

Lazer Tagging - Graffiti Research Lab







The Graffiti Research Lab is dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protestors with open source tools for urban communication. The goal of the G.R.L. is to technologically empower individuals to creatively alter and reclaim their surroundings from commercial and corporate culture. G.R.L. agents are currently working in the lab and in the field to develop and test a range of experimental technologies for the state-of-the-art graffiti writer.This site documents those efforts with video documentation and DIY instructions for each project.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Volume





This is an immersive light and sound sculpture that reacts to presence. Interaction is based on proximity, so without any participants it lies dormant, waiting to be awoken.Each column contains a matrix of multicoloured LEDs and a speaker. UVA use custom written camera tracking software to watch people moving through the space.As this photo explains, infrared lights are used to illuminate the area, whilst a high mounted camera looks down from above.

The sound fitted perfectly, sometimes subtle, othertimes responding to your movements past each column. The garden is fantastic location for work like this, the water puddles creating reflection, shadows around the architecture changing and sounds travelling around the space. The colour gradient fades are beautiful, and the nicest part was the interlude between scenes. The lights slowly die down, then pulsate with white light and sound in anticipation for the next visitors.

Multi-touch interaction research




While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

Intimate transations





Intimate Transactions is an exciting new form of interactive installation that allows two people in separate spaces to interact simultaneously using their bodies. Each participant uses a physical interface called a ‘Bodyshelf’. By gently moving their bodies on this ‘smart furniture’ they instigate ‘Intimate Transactions’, which influence an evolving ‘world’ created from digital imagery, multichannel sound and tactile feedback.

This shared experience allows each participant to gradually develop a form of sensory intimacy with the other, despite the fact that they are geographically separated and cannot physically see or hear each other. As this highly immersive experience evolves, each participant begins to sense their part in a complex web of relations that connect them, and everything else within the work. In this way a subtle, indirect form of collaboration develops via an increasing sense of intimacy between sites. Participants may choose to act in different ways as they begin to understand how their actions affect everything within the environment AND the other Participant. Hence the work focuses participants upon understanding influences and relationships within the work's ecologies.

The work is designed to be experienced for up to 20 minutes. Both Bodyshelves should be occupied in order to allow a full experience for all participants. The ‘Bodyshelves’ are embedded with an array of sensors, which detect shifting balances of bodyweight and different types of backpressure.

Bridge by Michael Cross



“Bridge is a spectacular new site-specific design commission for Dilston Grove, London (Cafe Gallery Projects) by Michael Cross. Housed in a former church, (one of the earliest examples of poured concrete construction and a Grade II listed building), the piece comprises submerging two thirds of the inside of the church in water, and producing a series of steps which rise out of the apparently empty man-made ‘lake’ as you walk across them. Each step emerges one step in front of you and disappears back underneath behind you as you go. This ‘bridge’ is purely mechanical, the weight of the person on it depresses each step a little, this force activates a submerged mechanism which raises the next step.

The public are invited to walk out on it as if walking on water, eventually reaching the middle of the lake, thirty steps and twelve meters from the shore. There they will stand alone and detached, stranded in the middle of a plane of water until they choose to return the way they came. For some people this experience of being cut off and surrounded by water will be peaceful, for others terrifying. For some walking across the water will be pure childish joy, whilst others will be too scared to try”.

Akarium call

Semitransparent Design is a company based in Japan, a talented bunch of artists and designers, consisting of members Ryoji Tanaka, Toshiyuki Sugai, Yusuke Shibata and Hiroshi Sato. I first became aware of their work when I wrote about Motion Wall from Nanika (read post). Semitransparent created Snow Wishes for the same interactive interiors shop exhibit.
Akarium Call is a reactive light installation along the 1km long trendy fashion Omotesando avenue in Tokyo. 60 columns of light run both sides the length of the road, are 6m high and 1m wide. This is during a light festival 9th Dec - 8th Jan, the first light festival in 8 years.
Users phone a number displayed on the columns, their voice then controls the pulsating lights. The final version used volume mapping to brightness of light, with a subtle fade in and out, as to not create a strobe light effect. Earlier versions used more complex sound signal processing, but in this public space it was harder to achieve, and they wanted to create an instant synchronized response to the user.

Scents of space








An interactive smell system that allows for three-dimensional placement of fragrances without dispersion .The study of the human olfactory system has progressed rapidly in recent years. However, when architects use fragrance in spatial designs, they tend to do so merely for branding purposes or for suggestive advertising (e.g. pumping the smell of coffee out onto a street to attract people into a store). Such designs fail to pick up on the potentials for developing evocative and memorable experiences using the sense of smell. This project demonstrates how smell can be used spatially to create fragrance collages that form soft zones and boundaries that are configurable on-the-fly.
Airflow within the space is generated by an array of fans. Moving air is then controlled by a series of diffusion screens to provide smooth and continuous laminar airflow. Computer-controlled fragrance dispensers and careful air control enable parts of the space to be selectively scented without dispersing through the entire space.
Designed by : Usman Haque

Sky ear






Sky Ear is a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky.
The cloud consists of 1000 extra-large helium balloons that each contain 6 ultra-bright LEDs (which mix to make millions of colours). The balloons can communicate with each other via infra-red; this allows them to send signals to create larger patterns across the entire Sky Ear cloud as they respond to the electromagnetic environment (created by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios, television broadcasts, etc.).

Using mobile phones people can listen to the actual sounds up high, the electromagnetic sounds of the sky as well as streams of "whistlers" and "spherics" (atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena that are the audible equivalent of the Northern Lights). Of course, the action of calling the cloud changes the electromagnetic environment inside and causes the balloons to vary in brightness and colour.
Sky Ear is a project by Usman Haque financially assisted by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology.
Electronics & B2B network by Seth Garlock, Senseinate Inc. Software by Rolf Pixley, Anomalous Research Ltd.
Microcontrollers provided by Texas Instruments, Inc.
Carbon fibre tubing for framework by RBJ Plastics, UK.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

HypoSurface




HypoSurface is the World's first display system where the screen surface physically moves! Information and form are linked to give a radical new media technology: an info-form device.
The surface behaves like a precisely controlled liquid: waves, patterns, logos, even text emerge and fade continually within its dynamic surface. The human eye is drawn to physical movement, and this gives HypoSurface a basic advantage over other display systems.
As a digital device, any input (sound, movement, an Internet feed...) can be linked to any output (logos, patterns, text...) This offers full interactivity with an audience, and a simple User Interface allows HypoSurface to be 'tuned' to any event, its wide range of effects choreographed easily (by you…)

Augmented Reality Kitchen - Jackie Lee, Leonardo Bonanni, Ted Selker






The real world is not a computer screen. When can augmented reality and ambient interfaces improve the usability of a physical environment? We presents data from design studies and experiments that demonstrate the value for ambient information and augmented reality design. The domestic kitchen is used as a domain to place smart technologies and to study visual attention, multi-tasking, food-preparation and disruptiveness.
Food is the most important thing to our daily life. Preparing, cooking, sharing, storage and playing food has its social and technoligical culture. Design and Artifical Intelligence approaches were taken to re-creating the food environment. Re-designing the kitchen and re-defining its components provides alternatives of life styles. Adding machine intelligence to these activities can enhance the processes of human-to-human communication and human-machine operations.

BUMP remote sensing by Assocreation






In each of the two cities Linz and Budapest a foot bridge made of wooden planks are installed. If someone steps on a plank in one of the cities, an impulse released from the body weight is immediately sent to the other bridge. So a pulse can be felt in the other city, as the parallel plank lifts itself around 1 cm which releases a pounding noise. One can feel realistically the footsteps of strangers in a foreign city.

Bump produces a gap in the urban interface, a site at which one no longer has firm ground under ones feet. A wooden grating on the asphalt - maybe an excavation? But now there is knocking from below and the boards rise up. Below is another city, reflecting the same irregularity, linked via data transmission line. What is going on there? Undifferentiated mass movements, a stampede of hundreds of feet at rush hour? What about late at night: two or three pairs of feet. A percept ible rhythm. Perhaps a message? Or just a game? We sense the illusion of proximity: directly below the board which raises up, we presume a force which approximates our own. But there is the apparatus, the pneumatic piston, the control valve, the sensor. Closeness is only an illusion; the distance is not abolished. The thin pine board is a wall hundreds of kilometres thick. A casual encounter turns into alasting irritation of the sense of direction: west is below, below is east. How close can we get together?