PLANET Future Interactions

On the most interesting “static” map I’ve ever seen is the “indicateur d’itinéraires” located on some of the metro station in Paris (this one is close to the entrance of Ligne 1 in Paris Gare de Lyon). You press the number of the metro station that you want to reach with the keyboard below and the suggested route appears displayed on the lights on the board.

Hopefully we are about to dive back into the Unity game engine for a truly exciting project, as such the glimpse of Unity 3 opens up a number of possibilities:

Dark Unity from Unity3D on Vimeo.

Thanks go to Chester of http://associated-architects.com/ for the link.

Regular readers will know we have been logging data in 12 cities via our Tweet-o-Meter, its still early days but the results for a weekend in London are intriguing.

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine opens tonight, March 9, at 7pm in New York City].

With the help of César Cotta and Joshua Hearn, and based on a design by Glen Cummings, we installed a massive, reflective vinyl wall graphic last night at 2am outside Storefront for Art and Architecture—and it looks amazing. Flash photographs make the city disappear and giant vinyl letters float in space.

But at least they're on target. Fairground target practice on the outskirts of Lhasa.

EASST Conference 2010
2-4 September, 2010
University of Trento, Italy

Performing Places

“The space of the city is not a static reality defined by built forms or demographic facts, but is instead a form of spatial practice created by the interweaving of everyday actions and interactions of its citizens. These interactions are no longer confined to face-to face contact, as communications media have re-arranged many social environments so that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways. Walls, doors, gates and distances still frame and isolate encounters, but new technologies have increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in physically defined settings. This session will look at how thinking about places as performative opens up new possibilities for both understanding and reacting to the potentials for communications technologies in space.

[Image: National Geographic: "A spelunker in a glacier cave in Greenland gazes upon colors and shapes that look more like a swirling galaxy than a cave formation." Photo by Carsten Peter].

Having now spent every available moment of every day for more than a week stuck inside Storefront for Art and Architecture, painting the floors and walls, installing vinyl, coordinating deliveries, sweeping up loose tape and sawdust, and more, I've decided to upload a slightly longer than normal cache of links. It might be a few more days before I can post again.

Using our recent tutorial on image stacking it is possible to stack images from both day and night to create a single image of the city skyline over time. The photograph below consists of 8400 images taken using a Go Pro HD with one image every 5 seconds. The streak of light to the left is the moon during the night time sequence, while the right hand light is the daytime sun. The small lights are aircraft during the evening:

I'm a fan of design provocation - little projects that challenge the way we think about and see the world. Which is why Sasha Pohflepp's camera made me smile - press the button and it pulls in a photo from the internet that was taken somewhere in the world at the same time. We're at a stage in human evolution where connectivity can still bring about a sense of child like surprise and wonder - pause a moment to enjoy it because it's an experience that most of you will look back on as an era of nostalgic innocence in years to come.

Yesterday in Lyon, Emmanuel Rondeau and myself organized a Lift@Home about gestural interfaces. We (Lift) indeed partnered with Imaginove, a French cluster of companies, research institutions and universities focused on video games, audio-visual, cinema, animation and multimedia. Several other Lift seminars will be organized around various topics such as the Social Web, 3D virtual environment, networked objects and locative media. We’ll focus on the uses and practices of each of these technologies, to reflect upon how they are appropriated by users and how this information can be fed back into the design process.

Just a quick note, on a break from painting the interior of Storefront, that I will be live on the air in NYC in about ten minutes, speaking with Harry Allen on his show Nonfiction . We'll be discussing architecture, The BLDGBLOG Book, and more. Tune into WBAI for audio...