Blast Theory performs again their first hybrid reality game

Can You See Me Now?, the hybrid reality game developed by U.K.’s group Blast Theory and Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Lab will be perfomed twice this upcoming month of April in Cambridge, U.K. People from all over the world are able to play online on the virtual streets of Cambridge against Blast Theory’s runners on the real city streets. To participate, you need to log-in to the game’s website (Can You See Me Now) on April 1-3 from 2-5pm (GMT) or on April 6-8 from 4-7pm (GMT). A more extensive explanation of the game can be found at the same website.

Tool for Enhancing Relationships Between Specific Groups and New Urban Spaces

SCOOT is a mixed reality experience designed by Deb Polson and Marcos Caceres, to explore the potentials of location-based games. Players have to solve clues located both in the real world and the virtual world. They interact with strange objects, receive information via SMS to their phones and have to text their answers to the games clues back to SCOOT.

As part of their journey around the site players will be introduced to the area and its surrounds. This orientation will not only be spatial, as the game explores also the history of the place and its dynamics. [via near near future]

GPS-Trans Net-Cellphone Performances

GPS-Art is a new field of art activity based on motion in open spaces. GPS-Art is the global interactive instrument used for the creation and processing of audio and video material. It integrates elements of audio-visual installation to be used as a new media transmission. The project is based on large outdoor scales of cities and open spaces; it is ready to be realized on land, air, underwater as well as in outer space.

All GPS-Art projects use the GPS-12 device (Global Positioning System), as well as the cell phone system. GPS-12 refers to the 12 satellites hanging above the Northern half of the globe; it’s used for navigation and measures in an interactive way many topographic parameters including latitude and speed. These measurments are the starting point of many art projects of GPS-Art. Since 2001 GPS-Art has been realized by a series of GPS-Trans net-cellphone performances.

Drifting and Chance

“One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: "driftingî], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” From Theory of the Dérive by Guy Debord. Continue reading

Tune in TONIGHT!

WHO: Pete Gomes and 38 North 118 West?s Jeff Knowlton + Naomi Spellman; DATE & TIME: March 30, 2005; 7:00 p.m. (EST, US); VENUE: Emerson College, Bill Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont Street, Boston and streamed live.

PETE GOMES’ work fuses new technologies and cinema. His “Geocinema” project utilizes Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and other devices to explore what it means to be able to return to the exact location where a film was made and how to utilize this ?unseen? information in the film. Gomes is a freelance director and digital film lecturer at the Architectural Association, London. He is also founder and director of “Park Bench TV” and “mutantfilm.”

38 NORTH 118 WEST focuses on site specific experimental works utilizing digital media, computing, and internet resources, and explores inventive ways to use GPS technology with rich cultural content. Jeff Knowlton is an artist, musician, lecturer, programmer, and museum preparator. Naomi Spellman is a transmedia artist and educator. Both teach at the University of California, San Diego.
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Observer and Observed

“Is it possible to be a stranger in your own neighborhood? The Visitor.Files project–by Christina Ray–originated with a wish to replicate the heightened awareness commonly felt when first landing in a foreign city, when every person, sight and smell appears curious and full of potential. For this project, I attempt to become a temporary visitor even in the most familiar of locations.

Visitor.Files documents the common flow of city sidewalk activity with multiple media and translates the recorded observations into a visual code presented as a series of hand-drawn maps.” Continue reading >>

Beyond Browsers on the Web and in the Museum

“Abstract: The defining characteristic of the digital era is the potential that it brings for ?real-time? interconnection between anything that can be measured, expressed, or controlled digitally. The World Wide Web stems from one type of digital interconnection: well-defined standards linking a ?browser? with remote machines presenting information to be browsed. Yet digital technology enables more than just new approaches to presentation, browsing, and searching. It can create dynamic connections between different physical spaces and across sensory boundaries, and provide experiential interfaces for interaction that move beyond the mouse, keyboard, and screen. It can relate the physical space of the museum to the virtual space of the Web for both individual and group experiences.” From Networked Multi-sensory Experiences: Beyond Browsers on the Web and in the Museum by Fabian Wagmister and Jeff Burke.

Shaping Networked Realities

ABSTRACT: The paper introduces a networked multi-user installation and interactive mixed reality environment that combines the fields of interactive art, telecommunication and streaming technologies. Phonic Frequencies is an audiovisual data space whose appearance can be altered via networked communication devices. Visitors are active agents and participate in shaping spaces as they control audiovisual data with their telephones.

Linking the physical space to the digital network space, Phonic Frequencies opens a hybrid reality for distributed sound exchange and visual communication, blurring the boundaries between verbal communication and digital information. The work attempts to break the conventional communication cycle of bidirectional dialogue and to consider the meaning of in- and output from a different perspective.” From Phonic Frequencies: Shaping Networked Realities by Tamas Szakal, Christoph Groenegress, Wolfgang Strauss, Predrag Peranovic (c) 2003

Telepresence, Haptic and Networked-Control Systems

“Telepresence has been defined by Prof. Thomas B. Sheridan in 1992 as a system in which the human operator receives “sufficient information about the teleoperator and the task environment, displayed in a sufficiently natural way, that the operator feels physically present at the remote site”. Hence a telepresence system enables a human operator to perceive and manipulate a remote environment.

A telepresence system consists of three components. The human system interface (HSI) is handled by the human operator. He/She commands the teleoperator to perform actions in a remote environment. HSI and teleoperator exchange command and feedback signals over a communication line.
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Teleinteractive Net Audio Experiment

DIALTONE is a net audio installation exposing the physical and virtual space of the internet and attempting to open this hybrid space for sounds, noises and words by using simple telecommunication instruments like telephones and answering machines. This audio interface between telephone network and internet explores how interaction and compression changes audio in a network. The installation connects the venue to our telecommunication network through sound and vision.