Sunday, May 11, 2008

Urban Screens, Urban Interfaces, Digital Media, and the Arts in Social-Public Spaces

intelligent agent vol. 6 no. 2interactive cityurban screens: mirjam struppek download pdf
I've noticed that an increasing number of articles I've come across have involved teams of inter-disciplinary researchers - computer scientists, engineers, social scientists, psychologists, educators, musicians, architects, artists, media artists, game developers... and more!
Each discipline involved in inter-disciplinary research brings a particular world-view to the discussion, with a vocabulary that reflects a history of ideas that span decades, if not more. This is true, to a certain extent, within disciplines. For example, the field of Human-Computer Interaction is comprised of many different sub-groups, and each sub-group has its own culture of research and method of sharing knowledge. We are experiencing convergence on many levels, and we haven't quite figured out the words we need to describe exactly what is going on.

Technology-supported human-world interaction is the phrase I created to help me handle things conceptually, and serves as an umbrella that covers the things that interest me within this sphere.
So what are we talking about here?

I recently participated in the Games for Health Conference. Eric Walker, from Ominous Development, in his talk about the development of a one-switch game, discussed the idea that when we think about games, there are three main areas of focus. One is the how the game is played within the machine, system, or computer. One is how the game is played within the interface, and one is how the game is played in the mind.

If you think about multi-player games, a fourth dimension is added- the social context. Take this one step further, in the realm of pervasive gaming, including mixed/augmented reality games, a fifth dimension must also be considered, which includes space, place, and geo-location. How does that play out in the world? I'd like to share a bit of what I've come across so far:

08 Urban Screens: The potential of screens for urban society
  • "URBAN SCREENS investigates how the currently commercial use of outdoor screens can be broadened with cultural content. We address cultural fields as digital media culture, urbanism, architecture and art. We want to network and sensitise all engaged parties for the possibilities of using the digital infrastructure for contributing to a lively urban society, binding the screens more to the communal context of the space and therefore creating local identity and engagement. The integration of the current information technologies support the development of a new integrated digital layer of the city in a complex merge of material and immaterial space that redefine the function of this growing infrastructure."
  • "URBAN SCREENS defined as various kinds of dynamic digital displays and interfaces in urban space such as LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, information terminals but also intelligent architectural surfaces being used in consideration of a well ballanced, sustainable urban society - Screens that support the idea of public space as space for creation and exchange of culture, strengthening a local economy and the formation of public sphere. Its digital nature makes these screening platforms an experimental visualisation zone on the threshold of virtual and urban public space." (Mirjam Struppek)

One company, Soda , is involved with emerging technologies that are used in public spaces: "Soda develops creative tools that help communities work, play, and learn together" .

The Soda team members come from both art and technical backgrounds. One of Soda's projects was "Energy", which was an external light installation at a school, consisting of 45 LED panels, distributed on a large structure, in view of the playground. The designs on each panel were created by students, and the software behind the displays incorporates video shot by the children, so the art can be easily changed.

Soda partnered with FutureLab to create Newtoon, a suite of web-enabled microgames and activities, designed to promote the learning of physics social way, played on mobile devices.

Case study of the Newtoon prototype

Urban Interfaces is a project of the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design, and builds upon the work of their previous Suburban Communities project.

  • "Urban Interfaces: designs, develops and evaluates “unconventional” interfaces, such as interactive urban/public screens, and mobile and embedded content, to improve social, economic and environmental sustainability, researching appropriation (adoption and adaptation) and embodied interaction (in the moment and in the world) in master-planned and existing residential communities."

People from the Urban Interfaces project recently presented a public displays workshop at CHI 08: Designing and Evaluating Mobile Phone-Based Interactions with Public Displays . According to the workshop paper, the " program is developing Future Ethnography to combine social context approaches, particularly ethnography, with participatory design, and applying it to mobile-, embedded-, and WWW-based experiences."

The people involved in this project include Ian MacColl and Margot Brereton, from ACID/QUT, Matthew D'Souza, Andrew Dekker, Adam Postula, Fiona Redhead, from the University of Queensland, Mark Billinghurst, from HACID/HITlabNZ, Ingrid Richardson, from ACID/Murdoch University, and Montse Ros, from ACID/University of Wollongong.

Update:

I recently received a comment from Ori Inbar with a link to http://www.gamesalfresco.com/, which has a good review of the "top ten" devices for mobile augmented reality, also known as AR.

Another interesting post from Games Alfresco reviews "top ten" augmented reality demos that have the potential to change augmented reality gaming. Comogard, the author of this post, writes that AR "has the potential to do something that parents can't: free gamers from their couches and usher them into the real world, to play".

In my opinion, AR games, played on mobile devices that support new games for health and learning. With the influx of large interactive displays (or interactive whiteboards) in public gathering spaces, libraries, museums, and schools, there is a possibility that mobile AR can be played out on a variety of screens, large and small.

At this point, only a few public displays allow for interaction with mobile devices, but it is possible that this will change. For example, in some AT&T stores, Microsoft Surface interactive tables have been installed, and interact nicely with mobile phones.




Some of the thought behind Microsoft's Surface came from the work of Shahram Izadi, now at Microsoft Research, Harry Brignull, now a user experience consultant at Madgex, and Yvonne Rogers, a professor of human-computer interaction at Open University, and others, on the Dynamo project.


(See my previous post- Revisiting Promising Projects: Dynamo- an application for sharing information on large interactive displays in public spaces.)



For detailed information about the Dynomo project, read The Iterative Design and Study of a Large Display for Shared and Sociable Spaces (pdf).


Harry Brignull's blog post, "Microsoft Surface: standing on the shoulders of giants" , written on the day the Surface was unveiled to the public last year, also provides good background information related to this topic.


Back to the Urban Screens discussion:

First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet, published a special issue, Urban Screens: Discovering the Potential of Outdoor Screens for Urban Society, in 2006. The articles were written by people from disciplines related to media and communications, so they provide a much broader perspective to the topic of large screen displays than found in journals published by the ACM or IEEE. (If you are a CS or IT academician involved in large display and/or ubiquitous computing research, this series is a must-read!)

Raina Kumra, in Hijacking the Urban Screen, discusses the use of non-traditional outdoor advertising, and looks at way this new "media skin" is responding to interaction, transforming the more traditional video billboard to something that is creative and invites public participation.

In Urban Screens: the beginning of a universal visual culture, Paul Marten Lester points to Otto Neurath's quote, "words divide, pictures unite". According to Lester, "Literal, narrative, horizontal, cloistered, and verbal culture is being replaced by symbolic, interactive, profound, global, and visual culture. Neurath would be pleased." Lester delves into the world of visual symbols, visual thinking, and visual communication. His reference list, for the academics out there, is full of gems!

Scott McQuire's article, The politics of public space in the media city, discusses the concept of hybrid spaces, or media cities, and his thoughts about access and interaction, and a "democratic public culture in cities connected by digital networks."


In The poetics of urban media surfaces, Lev Manovich discusses how technologies such as video surveillance, data-filled "cell-space", and electronic displays transform physical spaces into data-spaces (think "Internet of Things"). Included in his discussion is an outline of some of technological research related in some way to urban media surfaces: ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, tangible interfaces, wearable computers, intelligenct buildings, intelligent spaces, context-aware computing, ambient intelligence, smart objects, wireless location services, sensor networks, and e-paper.

I haven't finished reading all of the articles included in First Monday's special issue about urban screens. Listed below are the references and links for all of the articles, with links to many of the authors:

Hijacking the urban screen: Trends in outdoor advertising and predictions for the use of video art and urban screens by Raina Kumra First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/kumra/index.html

Urban Screens: the beginning of a universal visual culture by Paul Martin Lester First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/lester/index.html

The politics of public space in the media city by Scott McQuire First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/mcquire/index.html

The poetics of urban media surfaces by Lev Manovich First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/manovich/index.html

Interpreting urban screens by Anthony Auerbach First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/auerbach/index.html

Story space: A theoretical grounding for the new urban annotation by Rekha Murthy First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/murthy/index.html

The urban incubator: (De)constructive (re)presentation of heterotopian spatiality and virtual image(ries) by Wael Salah Fahmi First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/fahmi/index.html

Urban screens: Towards the convergence of architecture and audiovisual media by Tore Slaatta First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/slaatta/index.html

Towards an integrated architectural media space by Ava Fatah gen. SchieckFirst Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/fatah/index.html

Art and social displays in the branding of the city: Token screens or opportunities for difference? by Julia Nevárez First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/nevarez/index.html

For an aesthetics of transmission by Giselle Beiguelman First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/beiguelman/index.html

Intelligent skin: Real virtual by Vera Bühlmann First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/buhlmann/index.html

Programming video art for urban screens in public space by Kate Taylor First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society (February 2006),URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/taylor/index.html

Mirjam Struppek at Interaction Field: "Urban Space, Public Sphere, and the New Media"

Posted by Lynn Marentette at 1:14 PM
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1 comment:

Ori Inbar said...

check out a related blog that just posted a review of devices for mobile augmented reality at:
www.gamesalfresco.com

May 11, 2008 at 10:04 PM

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