CHI2011

I promised Il Professore that I would blog on my trip to CHI, and as yet have not found time to sit down and think about what I have been doing. It is always easiest just to do trip logging in chronological order, little and often, but I have been loathe to lug my macbook around with me as it is just that bit too heavy when you have a poorly shoulder. So, I have almost a week to catch up with. I did make notes in my little red book so I wouldn't forget the highlights, but there is more and more happening that I want to share and I am way way behind. I did think that maybe I would try and separate out the sociable parts of the trip from the work related parts of the trip.

And now I am getting distracted by talk of hoarded computer equipment by Bill Buxton at CHI, Must stop and listen.

3D film in the palm of your hand

Today I stumbled across yet another reason for getting an iphone in 2011: palmtop theater

This is a device that fits onto your iphone/ipod touch and enables you to watch films and animations that have been built in 3D. Well, the image is split into three sections so some parts are foregrounded and some backgrounded, the device has mirrors that reflect it up and hey presto a cinematic experience in the palm of your hand.

V2_Institute for Unstable Media is showcasing some works made specially for this, curated by Maki Ueda. The video explains how the technology works - how to prepare your images so they appear on screen as 3D.

V2_ seems like an interesting organisation to keep an eye on. If I were in Rotterdam I would try and get along to the showcase. It looks like several artists are developing work for the palmtop theatre following the artists workshops at V2_last year.

Palm Top Theater_i3DG, by Jitsuro Mase, Tom Nagae (JP) / DIRECTIONS, Inc.

As I can't get there I shall have to content myself with the videos and write-ups of the event.

I did notice when watching the youtube video that a couple of people have posted instructions on how they made their own versions of the viewer. Could be an interesting thing to try - a bit more complicated and time-consuming than making your own kaleidoscope perhaps.

immaterials: making rfid beautiful

I stumbled across a very interesting video about a clever idea from Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze - people worth watching if you are interested in novel and thoughtful design. I was following a link recommended to me by Sam Kinsley about the Making Future Magic project from Berg London, using ipads to create light animations. That work is well worth a look too.
But this video that I want to point people at, Immaterials: the ghost in the field, is all about "exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation" Basically that means they used a little LED light attached to an rfid tag and held it near an rfid reader to see when the tag and reader talked to each other, thus mapping out the edges of the range of the rfid. The video has a very clear explanation of why this is important for designers using rfid, and is intriguing enough to watch even if you aren't using rfid in your own work.
They are visualising the shape of the readable volume of different rfid tag readers - you can't see this footprint of rfid any other way, which can be a problem if you are a designer who needs to know where and at what angle to embed tags in relation to readers. Making a visual representation makes it easier for the designers to know where to place the components. And even if you aren't that bothered by any of that it's still worth watching.

trip to concordia

As is often the way I have a backlog of things that I want to write about that seem to have happened quite a long time ago tho really it's been only a few weeks.
I had a very interesting trip to Montreal, only my second visit to Canada and very different from my experience of Vancouver.
I was invited to visit the Oral History Research Centre at Concordia University, who were interested in work i have done in the past on locating oral histories using mscape. It was very flattering to be asked, and even more exciting to be paid to go. I cheekily asked if Dr Clodagh Miskelly could come with me too, as we worked together on the community based projects that seemed most relevant to talk about this time. So I had the benefit of catching up with Clodagh as well as getting the chance to meet some great people running some really interesting projects. Should have guessed that from their slogan "the stories people tell matter."
Special mention to Steve HIgh, Stacey Zembrzycki, Jessica Mills and Laurel Hart - who did a brilliant job of pointing us at interesting places to go and wander, and the best places to eat.

Apart from some interesting discussions on oral history, digital storytelling, locative media and so on, we gave a public talk and ran two workshops for people currently working on community based oral history projects with them. I hope we gave them an interesting introduction to some of the possibilities, perils and pitfalls of working with gps and pervasive media projects.

It was also good to revisit past work and realise that it was still interesting, and to try and map the spin offs in terms of people who got into mscape type projects through their involvement with the Southville CLASS group project on Wartime Childhoods.

Unrelated highlights of the trip were....

.....the best soya cappucino I have ever tasted, at café Myriade just over the road from Concordia university on rue Mackay

.....stumbling across Aux Vivres with Clodagh, an amazing vegan restaurant, a lucky break on my first night in a wet and windy Montreal, that we had to visit on our last day as we hadn't had space to eat their gateau fauxmage - the most fab cheesecake I have had in a while, even tho (or possibly because) it contained no cheese, milk, cream or butter. More of that in another post.

.....finding the co-operative book store on bishop street and enjoying the tshirt slogans, buying presents for family.

.....strawberry daiquiris at Mesa14. I've never had one before, well, not that I remember, so can't compare them but these were great - a very good way of taking the taste away of the worst meal I have had in years at some overpriced downtown jazz club in the touristy area.

more from branchage

It's a bit late but all this running around took a while to get over. Just thought I would share some more about working and socialising at Branchage

I was there to deliver a piece of pervasive media by Duncan Speakman, Always Something Somewhere Else, originally commissioned by HP labs as an mscape piece that could be applied anywhere in the world, as long as there is a tree to start from.....
The work was well received, on a sunny Sunday morning outside the Spiegeltent by St Helier harbour, even though a lot of us had been up partying the night before at the Bordée de Branchage with the lovely french gypsy orchestra (brought back memories of Negresses Vertes).
As always with mscape sessions, people want to talk afterwards about how they could see the potential for pervasive media as a way of delivering all sorts of things - I had interesting conversations with documentary makers, architects, town planners,from Jersey and elsewhere, about locating content in different contexts, and developing projects with various levels of participation. I pointed interested and enthusiastic people at the DCRC site and some of the work that past and present MA students have done with mscape, not least Jackie Calderwood and Dan Frodsham, and then I was off again sharing a taxi to the airport with two of the documentary filmmakers who had been showing work at the festival, Liz Mermin and Chloe Ruthven. Next year I want to hang around long enough to see some of the films!

Next stop Montreal

ipaq wrangling

Am sitting here in a hotel room in Jersey, sorting out ipaqs for tomorrow's demo at Branchage International Film Festival. I thought I would double check them all again becuase I had to take the batteries out to travel here - I hate the idea of the little buggers switching themselves on when they rub against each other in my hand luggage. I had the usual double check from security staff at the airport when twenty handheld devices popped up on the x-ray machine. Then I sat in the airport cafe removing all the batteries just to be on the safe side. It was a bit of a late night last night getting ready to come here - so much on top of the usual chaos! Carpet fitters laying carpet and taking off bathroom doors - which is a problem when you have paying guests, elderly mother in law passing out when shopping and being in hospital for heart tests, children being generally uncooperative with stessed parents etc etc But enough whinging.
I got here, had cream tea (well, coffee and walnut cake, and watched my daughter and her partner eat creamcakes, then headded to the hotel to get sorted. I put the batteries in the ipaqs, checked the settings (you have to make sure the devices don't go into powersave mode and dim their own screens or switch off). It was all going swimmingly 'til FOUR out of the 20 started complaining that they couldn't locate the file they wanted. Presumable the last user had set them to automatically load the mscape software and go to one particular experience, which I had deleted last night because I didn't need a music tour of Leeds city centre for this demo.
I tried clicking ok - no effect - then pushing buttons (hard buttons presumably disable) whinged out loud a little, and then texted Tom Melamed as he is usually quite helpful even out of hours when he senses desperation. Then I thought of factory reset trick - where you hold down the two outer buttons and stick the pen in the reset hole. Hurrah! It worked, but I had to then reload the mscape player as the reset to factory settings wipes out added bits and pieces (technical term). I'm glad I thought to check that, as I vaguely remembered being caught out before with that one. I was in full flow when text came from Tom, telling me to check the ipaq file store for a folder probably called 2577 and to delete or rename it and see if that works. I am writing that down for next time.

wordpress blogs

I have been using wordpress for a couple of different blogs, and have been finding it relatively easy to use. One irritation though was that wordpress automatically added a link that generated "possibly related links" This seems to mean that it trawls your posts for keywords, even if you don't tag them, and puts links to random blogs underneath your post. I had switched it off on the pervasive media blog a while ago, only with help from Sam Kinsley, but needless to say I had forgotten how to do this. I spent some time this evening clicking around and finally spotted Appearance > Extras > Hide related links.
Phew. No more uncontrollable links popping up on Today I threw out.