Mar 312008
For those who’ve attributed my recent silence to Sidney, she’s only part of the cause. I’ve also been doing a gig for OCAD recently — The Mobile Experience Lab was looking to showcase some of the cell phone technologies they’d developed over the past two years in public spaces. I started as a consultant on narrative and then I was kept on to implement the scenarios I’d written. It was a lot of fun working with a bunch of talented folk to figure out how to make these whimsical and odd things happen on John Street. They’re hoping to launch it this summer, funding and situation willing. [UPDATE: They didn’t.] Below is some documentation we got during the alpha and beta testing.
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| Cycling Erasure was installed in the window of Urbane Cyclist and encouraged people to wave their hands over the digital wheels to make the real wheel turn, surreptitiously taking pictures of them as they flailed. |
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| In Grange Cicadas, the player gets a plea for help from electronic insects who’ve been trapped in a wicker cage. |
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| Unlike the other newspaper boxes at Queen and John, the Your News box allowed the public to write the headlines and cover photos by texting and emailing them in. |
| Geoffrey Shea, one of the principle investigators, put together this vid after the alpha that shows most of the scenarios, including the two musical ones I didn’t work on. |
Interesting! You said you’d been doing some consulting; it looks like some really cool ideas you’re a part of.
Of course, I still think cell phones are evil, but at least they’re evil in intriguing ways. 😉
Ha! The funny thing is that we just got a cell in October, and it’s too old to do any of the neat things we were working on.
[…] Via No Media Kings […]
nitpick: it seems that the Camera Hunter video is being shown bigger than its original source… When our Hunter bends down in front of the camera, if you look at the outline of the sheet of paper, you can see the jogs where the video player has double-up lines and columns of pixels to stretch the video.
Err, also, that’s some pretty cool stuff. I just re-integrated the wireless crowd this month and I’ve fascinated by the potential that BlueTooth offers… I love what you’ve done here.