A revolutionary multi-player, multi-site game and arts space to be played across all five cities. Players use their own bodies to send balls of projected light across the playing space, aiming for goals representing the other cities. Entirely interactive, it’s a competition to see which city has the least light balls in their square when the time runs out. Designed to be aesthetically beautiful and great fun to play and watch, games are a minute long and run throughout the night. Just turn up and play, or get your team together in advance…

Link for the site.
Here is a google video of how people are playing it . It follows very basic rules and intuitive in that sense. 5 Courts was conceived, designed and programmed by digital media artists KMA (Kit Monkman & Tom Wexler).

Why do I blog this?
I think this piece is kind of important because of several points. First, it puts the user in its center and this is not only personal interaction, it becomes a collective set of action rules with opponents in other cities with the basic nature of the game. So the fun gets multiplied. Second, it uses cities as “castles” which might fit as a good example of urban computing application.

It talks about software systems like Jaiku’s which is based around the location of friends and family. One researcher from UCLA Danah Boyd puts a good alternative criticism of this information flooding:

“I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information,” said Danah Boyd, who researches social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“An increased flow of information should not be confused with a deeper bond.”

Boyd stressed that this also applied to other social media that gather large amounts of personal information, like blogs or digital photo accounts.

“The situation these technologies create is similar to what happens with Angelina Jolie or another celebrity,” Boyd said. “Just because I know a lot about a person does not mean they will help me on a tough day.”

An added risk for the location-announcing services is that people might find themselves unable to break away from following friends or old lovers, Boyd added.

“The problem is that people really, really love stalking,” Boyd said. “When you have just ended a relationship, it is not necessarily healthy to follow the exact location of your ex- lover minute-by-minute on your phone.”

from wikipedia:

Grid Computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems.

Those concepts also going to seem to merge at an important point for of us all. That is trust.

Still, I want to brainstorm more about this area and come up with at least something I can put in my room and play when I got bored.

• Start Learning C/C++ in Xcode. Watch the courses from Berkeley.
• Play with Arduino using Scanner and Controller (building a game can be good exercise).
• Do Lieberman’s Video Workshop. Get comfortable with playing pixels in processing until fall.

Those are what I can think right now. I might add more in the future. But now I am going to be lazy for a while!

quote:”-data is everywhere. information?”

scenario 1: user just goes in the room, he sees the screen full of data from various web sources that look meaningless to him. Once he is in the range of the sensing camera, he sees himself inside the screen as a silhouette covered with these information flow. According to his moves, the data becomes something more “meaningful” for him. I am looking for ways to get certain inputs from the user and/or how to create this “meaningful” information.

scenario 2: the information on the screen is related to physical character of the user. The sensing mechanism calculates height, the shape of the body, the colours of the user’s clothes, brands and spits information according to this. advertising? Is this really what user wants? What would be our reaction to a strange machine inspecting us and our privacy, while everyday we are being inspected with eyes of everyone that surrounded us.

scenario 3: the information sources could be constrained. classified(bloody news, happy news). certain mappings. Red shirt you wear brings wikipedia entry about red shirt etc. getting cues from the audience and spit information according to that. What kind of information, historical, geographical, biological, horoscope?

idea : we are surrounded with lots of data that is meaningless to us. Is there a way to make this data more meaningful for us? Do we want this data to be more meaningful? What kind of data is more attracting to us than others? Is there anyway to reveal certain patterns in user behaviors that gives cues about information they are looking for? Could these patterns improve the quality of the information sources over time?

This was last week, I still feel something is missing in my project that I’d would like to make users aware. Here is the steps that I am going to take in this project:
1 – Get screenshot of users image through a camera. Try to get cues related to user. Colors of what he/she wears, his/her height are the ones that look more appropriate as I am stressing not to get this information through his/her intentions. Why? By getting this information without his notice, I am suggesting the information is already there whether we want it to be there or not. But still this gives me so little and abstract information unfortunately.

2 – Get the average color value of the image. Go to flickr and mine random images that have similar average color values. Get their tags and display on the screen. This is a little bit tricky and is still not the final thought. What I am trying to question is, could be the information related to the owner with only getting so little data, data that is put out of his/her intentions. The problem I will likely come across is that I am afraid the users are not able to connect what they see on the screen with themselves and the work will be left conceptually. So I need a strong element that connects those two. I might escape this in processing with adding something that is following this users’ path.

3 – Starting random images in flickr doesn’t seem to be a good idea to me at this point. At least there has to be some connection, why flickr, why starting with random a as opposed to random b? Those questions are still waiting to be answered. Also I have come up with this project called Open Mind Commonsense. The page seems to be down, but there is an article in KurweizAI.net by Push Singh. This is really parallel what I am trying to achieve. I am after text, images etc which is already there related to us. check out this first paragraph from the article:

Why is it that our computers have no grasp of ordinary life? Wouldn’t it be great if your search engine knew enough about life so that it could conclude that when you typed in “a gift for my brother”, it knew that because he had just moved into his first apartment that he could probably use some new furniture? Or if your cell phone knew enough about emergencies that, even though you had silenced it in the movie theater, it could know to ring if your mother were to call from the hospital? Or if your personal digital assistant knew enough about people that it could know to cancel a hiking trip with a friend who had just broken a leg?

4- Wouldn’t it be great if we can search the text by its affective emotions and color code the text according to that?

Technically I started with baby steps and right now I can get average RGB – HSB values of an image without any problems. Here is my code:

[code]
PImage b;
void setup() {
b = loadImage("deneme.jpg");
int rsum = 0;
int gsum = 0;
int bsum = 0;

for (int i = 0; i color redk = (color) ((b.pixels[i] & 0xFF0000) >> 16);
// println("redk: " + redk);
color greenk = (color) ((b.pixels[i] & 0x00FF00) >> 8);
// println("greenk: " + greenk);
color bluek = (color) ( b.pixels[i] & 0x0000FF);
// println("bluek: " + bluek);

rsum += redk;
gsum += greenk;
bsum += bluek;
}
println(rsum/b.pixels.length);
println(gsum/b.pixels.length);
println(bsum/b.pixels.length);
float[] hsb = Color.RGBtoHSB(rsum, gsum, bsum, null);

// println(hsb[0]);
size(200,150);
image(b,0,0);
}
[/code]

So for my next step, I should figure out how to mine images in flickr and get their tags according to those images. I should still think how I can reveal sensible information and connect those with the users.

This comes from all the way from Japan: Computer Vision with Proce55ing. I haven’t checked out the applets in details, but the names seem quite explanatory. There are bunch of stuff here from temporal differencing to background subtraction from clustering to pixel analysis.

Dotimpac.to sample apps : Those examples are not necessarily related to CV but there are some samples that are using video. Also I am always curious what people are doing other side of the globe, so I am happy to find these. The links are mostly gathered from processing.jp and Takashi Maekawa!

KrazyDad’s page has some nice processing examples as well.

Nowhere is a landscape in the condition of development. the users of the german search-engine METAGER erode rivers, canyons and valleys by their search-movements. search-requests, existing only for a fraction of a second on the internet, get inscribed in a block of pu-foarm (75cm x 75cm x 10cm) by a 3d milling-machine. the continuous stream of queries defines the rhythm of the machine.

Another example could be Email Erosion.

Email Erosion automatically creates sculptures out of biodegradable, starch-based foam using spam and email as stimuli. Based on email, the Eroder may elect to rotate the foam, raise or lower the Sprayer or erode the foam with a spray of water.

What I like about those pieces are mainly their ability to create something totally different from the actual source, transform this data more than mapping the data itself to a concrete material at least.

According to the Lev Manovich’s paper [Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime, 2002 .doc format] one of the earliest mapping project which revived lots of attention was Natalie Jeremijenko’s “live wire”.

The movement of the dangling wire is proportional to the number of packets on the network. That is, the more traffic on the local area network, the higher the frequency of the “wiggles.” The transceiver plugs into the network, and the dynamic behavior of the wire become an intuitive peripheral representation of the network activity. In contrast to a screen based graph of ethernet activity this device is a shared social display of information.

In his paper, Malovich points out that data visualization arts should be carrying certain reasons in their work. One of them is arbitrary versus motivated choices in mapping. He questions the artist’s mapping selection since the computers allow us to easily map any data set into another set. He suggests to foreground the arbitrary nature of the chosen mapping as one way to deal with this problem. Another question he stresses is the conceptual elegance and poetry that is lacking in the works. He gives the modern art as the example showing us the ambiguity always present in our perception and experiencee, to show us what we normally don’t notice or don’t pay attention to. He expects same kind of approach in visualizations.

The more interesting and at the end maybe more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society. If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new “data-subjectivity,” how can we represent this experience in new ways? How new media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the multi-dimensionality of our experience, going beyond already familiar and “normalized” modernist techniques of montage, surrealism, absurd, etc.? In short, rather than trying hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human subjectivity – including its fundamental new dimension of being “immersed in data.”

Funny when I was searching for live wire project in google, I have come up with Sculpting with Data class that Tom Igoe taught in Spring 2003. I am kind of surprised that class is not being offered last year or this year.

First, we built networks to help us find information. Google is a great example of this: pop in a few keywords and get back all the matches to your search.

Second, we are currently building networks to help us acquire knowledge. Knowledge is more than just information; knowledge is information plus context. Knowledge is information which has been sifted by human hands (or, more precisely, human minds), sorted, organized, and structured, so that the next person who comes along seeking knowledge can quickly and effectively absorb it.

And according to this technologist, philosopher and artist Mark Pesce, if knowledge is information plus context, understand is knowledge plus experience. Understanding is not data; it cannot be stored by a computer in any meaningful way. It resides within us, within the chain of experiences that makes us what we are. We can know a fact, but until we have lived through that fact, we have no understanding of it. Also one of the main properties of this approach is, the understanding should be dynamic, blogs as we see are first but static examples of those third era. According to the writer, this is the point where it comes to mobile.

This is rather an interesting point, I remember Josh Knowles was trying to build some kind of digital social network where evey person writes his/her expertise and interest fields. So that if you need any help at that time, you would know whom you are going to contact with.

In his concept of a mobile digital social network he tells more in details with examples. Liverecord is a mobile java application which allows you to submit your quality tips to a backend server. The server could be accessed through top tips from your friends while you share your quality with them. This could be a growing system pretty quick if you make it to read a tip you should write a tip approach.

So I was thinking personally that, the social networks sites that I am connected, I am getting away from describing myself in my profiles. Not that I don’t like, I don’t like that fact that if I start to list I feel like I am getting restricted somehow. It could be the first cautious approach towards those applications, and what I perceive in general is, how much you explain yourself, you are getting that much response.

So this third era is also supporting that view. It is how much you express yourself, so that people can take the most out of from you although I see some flaws and dangerous points at that. This is more likely the potential ultrapost-consumer approach at some point if people realize that their experiences are learnt. It all comes to teacher’s ethics maybe.

Anyway it was an interesting read. It would be nice to test it with an example application based on textmessaging.