Interactivity For An Urban Digital Experience

This is the third and last of a series of posts about a new urban digital experience in the streets of Yonkers, New York. [You can the previous posts, click on part1 and part2.]

As a reminder, the two main goals of this project are:

  • To enhance the street life of the city by offering delightful destinations and interesting experience, a new kind of urban design
  • To engage, entertain, educate and reinforce the image of Yonkers as an historic center of innovation and to inspire the creativity of its current residents

We started out with a wide variety of content that entertains, educates and reinforces the residents’ understanding of their city. As the City government takes over full control of this, the next phase will be about deepening the engagement and interactivity with pedestrians – what will really make this a new tool of urban design.

This post is devoted to just a few of the possible ways that a digital experience on the streets can become more interactive.

First, a note about equipment and software. I’ve mentioned the high-quality HD projectors and outdoor speakers. I haven’t mentioned the cameras that are also installed. Those cameras have been used so far to make sure that the system is operating properly. But the best use of cameras is as one part of seeing – and with the proper software – analyzing what people are doing when they see the projections or hear something.

The smartphones that people carry as they pass by also allow them to communicate via websites, social media or even their movement.

With all this in place, it helps to think of what can happen in these four categories:

  1. Contests
  2. Control of Text
  3. Physical Interaction
  4. Teleportation

Contests

What’s your favorite part of the city? Show a dozen or so pictures and let people vote on them – and show real time results. It’s not a deeply significant engagement, but it will bring people out to show support for their area or destination.

Or people can be asked: what are your top choices in an amateur poetry contest (which only requires audio) or the best photography of the waterfront or a beautiful park or the favorite item that has been 3D printed inside the library’s makerspace? Or???

Even the content itself can be assessed in this way. We can ask passersby to provide thumbs up or down for what it is they are seeing at that moment. (Since the schedule of content is known precisely this means that we would also know what the person was referring to.)

People could vote on what kind of music they would want to hear at the moment, like an outdoor jukebox, or on what videos they might want to see at the moment.

Contests of this kind are a pretty straightforward use of either smartphones or physical gestures. Cameras can detect when people point to something to make a choice. It is possible to use phone SMS texting to register votes and the nice thing about this use of SMS is that it doesn’t require anyone to edit and censor what people write since they can only select among the (usually numerical) choices they’re given. SMS voting can be supplemented with voting on a website.

Control Of Text

Control implies that the person in front of a site can control what’s there merely by typing some text on a smart phone – or eventually by speaking to a microphone that is backed by speech recognition software.

People can ask about the history of people who have moved to Yonkers by typing in a family name, which then triggers an app that searches the local family database.

This kind of interaction requires that someone or a service provides basic editing of the text provided by people (i.e., censorship of words and ideas not appropriate for a site frequented by the general public).

Physical Interaction

With software that can understand or at least react to the movement of human hands, feet and bodies, there are all kinds of possible ways that people can interact with a blended physical/digital environment.

In a place like Getty Square where the projectors point down to the ground, it’s possible to show dance steps. Or people can modify an animation or visual on a wall by waving their arms in a particular way.

Originally in Australia, but now elsewhere, stairs have been digitized so that they play musical notes when people walk on them. These “piano stairs” are relatively easy to create and actually don’t really need to be stairs at all – the same effect can be created on a flat surface and it doesn’t have to generate piano sounds only.

In Eindhoven, the Netherlands, there is an installation called Lightfall, where a person’s movements control the lighting. See https://vimeo.com/192203302

Pedestrians could even become part of the visual on a wall and using augmented reality even transformed, say into the founder of the city with appropriate old clothes. Again, the only limit is the creativity of those involved in designing these opportunities.

Teleportation

The last category I’m calling teleportation, although it’s not really what we’ve seen in Star Trek. Instead with cameras, microphones, speakers and screens in one city and a companion setup in another, it would be possible for people in both places to casually chat as if they were on neighboring benches in the same park.

In this way, the blending of the physical and digital provides the residents with a “window” to another city.

I hope this three-part series has given city leaders and others who care about the urban environment as good sense of how to make 21st blended environments, how they might start with available content and then go beyond that to interaction with people walking by.

Of course, even three blog posts are limited, so feel free to contact me @NormanJacknis for more information and questions.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

Digital Content For A New Urban Experience

Last week, I posted an overview of a new urban digital experience in the streets of Yonkers, New York.

With the ability to project anything you want on a large wall of a highly-trafficked site or on the ground of the historical center square of a city, how do you kick off something like this?

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In this post, I’ll outline the approach we took for the first phase. (Next week, I’ll describe the more interesting and engaging future.)

The two main goals of this project are:

  • To enhance the street life of the city by offering a new, interesting experience, a new kind of urban design
  • To entertain, engage, educate and reinforce the image of Yonkers as an historical center of innovation and to inspire the creativity of its current residents

With that in mind, we looked for certain kinds of content. Because many residents of the city and an even larger percentage of visitors know little of its history, we wanted to give them some background. Here are some examples:

  • We worked initially with the public library to obtain the front page of the main city newspaper of a hundred years ago. In addition to projecting the front page on the wall of the Riverfront Library building, we created a kind of old time radio news summary of that front-page news, sandwiched between appropriate sounding news bulletin music from years ago. Even when there was daylight and the front-page graphic couldn’t be seen, people could still hear the news headlines. As it turns out, with a Presidential election and the onset of America’s entry into World War I, the days’ news from a hundred years ago was pretty interesting.
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  • We also had a variety of short documentaries about the history of the city that were part of a regular weekly program. This included items related to special events. For example, when the annual Yonkers Marathon was run, you could see video of the previous year’s marathon as well as a Pathé news reel about the marathon in the 1930s.

    There was footage from a drone.

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  • We also included features about the business of the city, called Made in Yonkers, that enables residents to see inside the buildings that are normally closed to the public and to learn about the interesting things going on. Indeed, this kind of venue allows people to see inside any buildings that are closed – museums that are closed at night can still show their contents. It is also possible to show how a part of the city has changed in the last hundred years or even recently or how it will change in the future – just by overlaying a projection of the past or proposed future.
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  • We identified the great musical artists and other performers who had lived in Yonkers – from WC Handy (of early blues/ragtime), to Gene Krupa (jazz drummer) to the singers Ella Fitzgerald and Steven Tyler (local high school grad and originally lead singer of Aerosmith) to the famed comedian Sid Caesar, among others – and put together shows that informed the public of their work and their relationship to the city.
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  • Then we wanted to celebrate the creativity and artistry of current residents. One of the first organizations to cooperate with this project was the Yonkers Philharmonic. On Wednesday nights, you can see them perform if you’re just walking down the street. You can also hear them many mornings, while you wait for your train.
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  • The relatively new Westchester Center for Jazz and Contemporary Music made an album available.
  • Similarly, Friday nights are usually devoted to musical shows from the two local theater companies and performances from the schools. Yonkers also runs its own Idol contest and the most recent edition of that is also shown from time to time.
  • Yonkers, like other cities, runs various festivals during the year – from Friday night Jazz on the waterfront in the summer, to Riverfest that features folk music, to Hispanic and other ethnic group events. The best performances from those are also shown periodically.
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  • As a side note, there is some reassuring about seeing a summer jazz festival
    or a flower garden

    when it’s the middle of February and the streets still have snow. It cheers you up!

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  • Yonkers is also the home of Sarah Lawrence College and an outpost of Purchase College, both of which are especially strong in the arts. The Westchester Community College also has a branch in the city and its Digital Arts program was an early contributor to the content. These local colleges then provided and even created content especially for this project, including animations, documentary videos and new music.

This is only a partial list. If it had to do with Yonkers, if it happened in the city and helps residents appreciate where they live, then it became part of the content library. That library is still growing.

Visual projections on a big concrete wall are pretty straightforward. For the projections on the ground, the same kind of videos won’t quite work all the time and there more emphasis is given to animations, graphics and text.

Obviously, visual projections are limited to nighttime. But the speakers are on all day. So, there is a program for the morning and evening rush hour – usually a sample of what had been played the night before.

And, for a little fun and to liven up the street, during the middle of the day at random times, pedestrians hear little clips of musical sounds or other ambient sounds, like elephants roaring. Huh? I’m walking in Yonkers and I hear an elephant? That will wake up people who have stopped paying attention to their environment.

From some of the examples I’ve given, you also get the sense of how you can transport people mentally. You can show them what’s happening in a different part of the city. You can show them the sunset from yesterday or the flowers of spring when it’s still winter. All of this can uplift the mood of a city.

Clearly the focus of the content I’ve described was on this city – Yonkers – but any city could do the same. People, even city government folks, were surprised at how much content there was about the city. Your city too has much to show. You just need to look and be a bit creative about it.

But even what I’ve described here doesn’t fully take advantage of the opportunity to create new street experiences. More on that next time.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

A New Urban Digital Experience In Yonkers, New York

Over the last several years, I’ve written about the value of blending digital and physical spaces for cities so that they can create new exciting, delightful destinations that will inspire and attract people. This was one part of the work I did for the US Conference of Mayors on a strategy to ensure the viability of American cities — especially mid-sized and smaller cities — in a post-industrial, digital age.

Mayor Mike Spano, an innovative public leader and dedicated son of Yonkers, New York, saw one of my presentations at an annual meeting of the mayors and thought it would fit well with the revitalization program he had initiated in his city.

That’s how I got started helping the City bring the “Yonkers Digital Experience” to life.  (The picture below is from the press conference launching the project.)

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There’s a lot to this project so this will be a series of posts — an overview in this post and then later more detail about the content and future direction of the project.

Yonkers is a city of about 200,000 people, on the northern border of New York City along the Hudson River. It was founded in 1646 during the Dutch colonial period, but grew dramatically during the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th century. For example, it was the birthplace of the Otis Elevator Company. But like many other similar cities in the US and elsewhere, it suffered during the long decline and out-migration of industrial jobs.

With that background, there are two main goals of this project in Yonkers:

  • To enhance the street life of the city by offering a new, interesting experience, a new kind of urban design
  • To entertain, engage, educate and reinforce the image of Yonkers as an historical center of innovation and to inspire the creativity of its current residents

As befits a smaller city — and one that didn’t want to have this supported by commercial advertising which would detract from quality of life — the project was very built on a very economical budget. Instead of huge LED displays, like Times Square, it uses high quality projections and outdoor speakers. When it’s dark, the video is seen and engaged. During the day, there is only audio. The projectors are attached to existing street lights and are relatively unobtrusive.

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While the cost of all this technology has come down dramatically over the last few year, it is still not a trivial technology project to implement. The complete system that takes the contributed digital content and ultimately displays it consists of several independent components of technology that are not always simple to integrate.

For the initial roll-out, two different kinds of sites were selected and handled quite differently.

The first site is the large concrete wall of the big Riverfront Library, which is across the street from the main train station and a big city park (with the Saw Mill River running through it). It is also very near the more upscale apartments that face the Hudson River and the Palisades. This is already an attractive area with lots of pedestrian traffic. It is ideal for the presentation of past and current performances, history, and the like in a fairly conventional way.

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The second location is Getty Square, which was the center of the city a hundred years ago, but is now not quite as important.  In this location, there are two projectors with speakers that are aimed at the ground in the center of the “square”. This is an edgier location and one that is expected to be the center for more non-traditional experiments in art and interaction.

While there have been projections on walls in various cities around the world, especially in Europe, these have usually been limited to the few days of a festival and have mostly been opportunities for graphic artists to use a building wall as a canvass – rather than to create a new permanent urban experience.

From what I’ve seen and read, the closest project to what Yonkers is doing has taken place in Montreal. But in Montreal, the program has been fairly static and solely visual, without sound, the impact on passers-by is limited. Nor does it seem they have any longer-term plans to enable interaction with residents on the street.

So, the Yonkers Digital Experience is an early experiment in urban design, technology and engagement.

The next post will be a review of the kinds of content that is currently part of this project. The final post will highlight where this kind of project can go, as it uses some fun digital technologies.

If you’re interested in the previous blog posts on this general subject, they can be found here:

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

Creativity Versus Copyright

In the Industrial Age, the fight between labor and the owners of industry (“capital”) was the overarching political issue. As we move away from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge that debate is likely to diminish.

Instead, among the big battles to be fought in this century, will be about intellectual property — who controls it, who gets paid for it, how much they get paid, who owns it and whether ideas can properly be considered property in the same way we consider land to be property.

I’ve written about this before, but a recent story about the settlement of a suit by Star Trek was settled recently, as reported in the NY Times, brought this to mind, especially as I came across an interesting series of posts that provide some new perspectives.

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These were written at the end of last year and the beginning of this year by the former chair of the Australian Film Critics Association, Rich Haridy.

His aim was to “examine how 21st century digital technology has given artists a set of tools that have dismantled traditional definitions of originality and is challenging the notions of copyright that came to dominate much of the 20th century.”

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Here’s a quick, broad-brush summary of his argument for a more modern and fairer copyright system:

  • Not just in today’s digital world of remixes, but going back to Shakespeare and Bach and even before that, creative works have always been derivative from previous works. They clearly have originality, but no work is even close to being 100% original.
  • The tightening of copyright laws has undermined the original goal of copyrights — to encourage creativity and the spread of knowledge.
  • This reflects the failure of policy makers and the courts to understand the nature of creativity. This is getting worse in our digital world.
  • While the creators and distributors deserve compensation for their works, this shouldn’t be used as a reason to punish other artists who build and transform those works.
  • The enforcement is unequal. While bloggers and artists with limited financial means are easy targets for IP lawyers, the current system “while [theoretically] allowing for fair use, still privileges the rich and powerful, be they distributors or artists.”

It’s worth reading the series to understand his argument, which makes a lot of sense:

Haridy is not proposing destruction of copyrights. But if arguments, like his, are not heeded, don’t be surprised if more radical stances are taken by others — just as happened in the past in the conflict between labor and capital.

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© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/157274980178/creativity-versus-copyright]

Blockchain And The Arts

Huh? Blockchain and the Arts?

If you’ve heard about blockchain at all, it is most likely because of Bitcoin, the alternative non-state sanctioned currency. But the uses of blockchain go beyond Bitcoin.

If you don’t know about blockchains, there are many sources of information about them, including Wikipedia. For a little, but not too much detail, I like this explanation:

“The Blockchain is a … database technology, a distributed ledger that maintains and ever growing list of data records, which are decentralised and impossible to tamper with. The data records, which can be a Bitcoin transaction or a smart contract or anything else for that matter, are combined in so-called blocks. In order to add these blocks to the distributed ledger, the data needs to be validated by 51% of all the computers within the network that have access to the Blockchain.

“The validation is done via cryptography, which means that a mathematical equation has to be solved … Once the validation is done, the Block will receive a timestamp and a so-called hash. This hash is then used to create the next block in the chain. If even one bit in the block changes, the hash will change completely and as a result, all subsequent blocks in the chain will change. Such a change has to be validated again by 51% of all the nodes in the network, which will not happen because they don’t have an incentive to work on ‘old’ blocks in the chain. Not only that, the blockchain keeps on growing, so you would require a tremendous amount of computing power to achieve that, which is extremely expensive. So it is simply not worth it to change any data. As a result, it is nearly impossible to change data that has been recorded on the Blockchain.”

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The protection of the digital material from snoopers, the strong validation and the decentralization of blockchains are especially attractive.

The potential uses of blockchain are a hot area for venture investment. And there’s a cottage industry in consultants providing advice on the subject. One of the most well-respected gurus of the business world, Don Tapscott, just co-authored a book on the subject with his son Alex, who is CEO of a venture capital firm that specializes in blockchain companies. It’s called “Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, And The World”.

More than a year ago, R3, a consortium of banks and related companies from around the world – now numbering about four dozen – started to develop their own blockchain.  

Sure, it’s understandable that bankers are interested in this technology. But artists?

I suppose some artist will, at some point, figure out how to use blockchain as a new art form – dropping little pieces of an artistic puzzle in a chain. But that’s not what the usual interest is about.

Instead, since the digital age started, quickly followed by widespread digital piracy then reduced incomes for many artists, people have wondered how artists will be able to continue their artistic work – the long history of “starving artists” aside.

Blockchains have been gaining adherents as a way to help establish ownership and subsequent payment for use.

In their book, the Tapscotts describe a virtual nirvana for artists, built atop blockchains which would enable artists to register their works, enter into “smart contracts” and generally be at the center of the creative ecosystem, rather than as the lowest person on the totem pole.

Last week, Don Tapscott reiterated the point in “Blockchain Could Be Music’s Next Big Disruptor – Artists can finally get what they deserve”.

Daniel Cawrey made a similar argument in his article, “How Bitcoin’s Technology Could Revolutionize Intellectual Property Rights.”

There are already some startups providing blockchain services for intellectual property, such as Blockai and Ascribe .

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And blockchain technology, in theory, could be beneficial for artists. But there are practical obstacles in making this happen and, in the long run, a fundamental flaw in the plan.

Let’s start with the practical question as to how this gets set up.
Here are just a few questions, off the top of my head. 

Who does it?  Without getting into the technical weeds here, there is also a question as to what characteristics a particular blockchain service would have – yes, there are options. How can the “platform” provider be reimbursed? Do you start from scratch or try to negotiate with agencies already serving related functions, like ASCAP? Who polices all this to make sure that the record established in the blockchain is actually being used to compensate artists?

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The bigger issue is treating ideas or creativity as “intellectual
property” – in economics terms, as a private good, instead of a public good. As
we have learned, most inventions and creations are not the result of a
solo hermit genius, but are the result of direct or indirect
collaboration.  So this concept of the idea as private property of the
first person (or corporation) to claim it is debatable. New ideas and
creative works may be more public, than private, good.

As Thomas Jefferson, amateur scientist and political philosopher, said some time ago:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

I’m looking at this issue in a very pragmatic, non-ideological way. Simply, although technology may make it feasible to track ideas and government laws may try to put a private label on them, this often doesn’t work because it goes against the nature of the good. Some things might start out as private enterprises, but if they are in essence public goods, the private enterprise will fail.

Consider the development of mass transit in many cities, mostly which were franchises to private companies until those companies realized they couldn’t really make a profit in the business.

I’m not sure what the answer is to prevent artists from starving because they can’t live on the money they receive while being artists. Blockchain may have a role. But the solution will take more than just continuing to think about the problem in a fundamentally flawed way as the protection of private property.

If you’re not an artist, you need to understand this also affects you.  How people get enough income to live comfortably is an ever increasing problem in an age where an ever increasing number of people have to be creative, not just making music and art, but all kinds of ideas and works.

[Note: For a related blog post, see The Internet & The Battle Over Innovation.]

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/151670251222/blockchain-and-the-arts]

Art And The Imitation Game

The
recent movie, the Imitation Game, brought attention to the Turing Test to a general audience.  First proposed by the British mathematician
Alan Turing, the test basically proposes that computers will have achieved
artificial intelligence when a person interacting with that computer cannot
distinguish between it and another human being.

Last
year, it was reported that a machine successfully passed the Turing Test – sort
of.  (See this article
in the Washington Post, for example.) 
While that particular test didn’t set a very high standard, there is no
doubt that machines are getting better at doing things that humans only used to
do.

This
past Sunday, there was an article in the New York Times Weekly Review titled “If
an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?
”  Its (presumably human) author warned us that
“a shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by
computer algorithms.” 

For
example, the Associated Press uses Wordsmith
from Automated Insights.  With its Quill product, Narrative
Science originally started out with sports reporting, but is now moving into
other fields.

The
newspaper even offered its own version of the Turing Test – a test
of your ability to determine when a paragraph was written by a person or a
machine.  Try it.  (Disclosure: I didn’t get it right 100% of
the time, either.)

But,
of course, it doesn’t stop with writing. 
More interesting is the use of computers to be creative.

This is because
among the differences between humans and other animals, that some people claim,
is our ability to produce creative works of art.  Perhaps going back to the cave paintings,
this seems to be an unusual human trait. 
(Of course, you can always find someone else who will dispute this, as
in this article, “12
artsy animals that paint
”.)

While
we may find animals painting to be amusing, perhaps we’d find machines becoming
creative as more threatening. 

Professor
Simon Colton is one of the leaders in this field – which, by the way, goes back
at least two decades.  He has written:

“Our position is that, if we perceive that the software has been skillful, appreciative and imaginative, then, regardless of the behaviour of the consumer or programmer, the software should be considered creative.”

He and his team have worked with software called Painting Fool.  This post has some examples of that artwork, so you can judge for yourself if you could tell a computer generated it.

I have my own little twist on this story from more than ten years ago.  I met some artist/businessmen who designed and then had painted high end rock concert t-shirts.  These were intended to be sold at the concert in relatively small quantities, as an additional form of revenue.  

The artist would prepare the design and then have other people paint them.  But this was a slow tedious process so we discussed the use of robots to take over this process.  (At the time, the role of robotic painting machines in auto factories was becoming well known.)  

One of the businessmen posed an obstacle by noting that people bought the hand-painted product because each was slightly different, given the variation between artists who painted them and even the subtle changes of one artist on any day.  I somewhat shocked him by pointing out that, yes, even that kind of randomness could be computer generated and his customers would not likely be able to tell the difference.  

But, perhaps, computers could tell the difference.  A computer algorithm correctly identified Jackson Pollock paintings, as reported in a recent article in the International Journal of Art and Technology.  (A less technical summary of this work can be found in a Science Spot article of a few weeks ago.)

In the end, they didn’t use robots because they were too expensive compared to artists in the Philippines or wherever it was they hired them.  Now, the robots are much cheaper, so maybe I should revive the idea 

Anyway, we’re likely to see even more impressive works of creativity by computer software and/or by artists working with computer software.  The fun is just beginning.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/113350817355/art-and-the-imitation-game]

Images Of Moving?

I’ve written before about spaces that blend the virtual and physical, but those spaces didn’t move.  Now we have new vehicles planned that take this blended reality on the road.

Below are just some news items that caught my eye over the past few months featuring the frontiers of vehicle technology, beyond the well-publicized self-driving cars.

First up is Lexus’s Art in Motion, which analyzes the way the car is being driven and reflects that in a portrait of the driver on the display screen in the car, as in the next picture.  For more information see http://www.artismotion.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8cqJptwNVI

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Toyota’s FV2, “Fun To Drive”, concept vehicle is not quite a car. But it combines features of a car, a motorcycle, augmented reality, robotics, human/machine communications and sensing of the driver’s mood.  Like other concept cars, it may never hit the road, but it’s fun to think about.  Here are two pictures and read http://www.toyota-global.com/tokyoms2013/fv2/ for more information from the company.  Oh, and they also have a smartphone app, that you can get now, to simulate what the FV2 is like.

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We’ve seen self-parking cars on the road, but for those really tough parking spaces you may need to ask your passenger to get out and guide you in inch-by-inch.  But what if you’re driving alone?  Well, you’ll have to be your own passenger.  Just get out of the car and park it using your smartphone.  See how this is done with a VW car at http://youtu.be/PfcHm70BHL8

Prof. Michael Ferreira of Portugal’s University of Porto has developed what he calls a “see through” system that lets you see through the vehicle ahead of you.  The project has a video that sort of shows the system – http://youtu.be/Esh1EjgBQaI . More information, in English, can be found at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029394.600-augmented-reality-system-makes-cars-seethrough.html

MIT Professor Berthold Horn has developed a system that would tame traffic jams by coordinating cruise control among all the cars.  For more information, see http://web.mit.edu/press/2013/algorithm-could-mitigate-freeway-backups.html

Finally, for those drivers who end up being pursued by the police, law enforcement agencies have a new tool from StarChase that’s being tested now.  It enables the police to shoot GPS locators on the target vehicles so they don’t have to engage in one of those dangerous car chases.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/73512317522/images-of-moving]

Art In The City Or The City As Art (Part 2)?

Last week, I blogged about the blending of physical and virtual space to create new places and experiences in a city.  This way the city itself is the art form, not merely the backdrop for some unrelated, unintegrated work of art.

There are a few examples of this blending of the virtual and physical already happening in various ways.  

  • In Aarhus, Denmark, the public library opened a public space for residents to use their mobile devices and create a collective work of digital art that could then be “posted” on the walls.
  • In Times Square in New York in 2010, the retail outlet Forever 21 put a fashion model on a display screen.  She took pictures of the real crowd below and then showed it on the screen.  (See www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtLX52z4kPU)  The story goes that it was so successful, the police asked the company to shift the angle of the screen because drivers were stopping to look.
  • Just as in a connected world, we say that “work goes to people, instead of people going to work,” so too have retailers started to bring the store to where people are instead of trying to entice them into stores.  As an example, PeaPod converted the walls of the Chicago Transit Authority into virtual supermarket display cases where people can use their smart phones to buy food that will be delivered to their homes later.  
  • In Australia, partly as a public health measure to encourage walking instead of escalator use, the city painted some stairs to look like piano keys and then linked that up to computer generated sounds.  As people walked on the stairs, they were playing music.  Another “Wow” experience that is not expected by residents and visitors – http://www.chordstrike.com/2009/11/piano-stairs.html
  • Mercedes Benz has demonstrated “transparent walls”, on which is projected what is happening on a side street a car is approaching.  That way a driver can see something coming before it would normally be visible.  The safety benefits are pretty obvious.  For a video, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LqCMv3Nz4ZQ#

Of course, each city is different so there is still a large element of creativity in developing an appealing and appropriate blend of the virtual and physical.  That will be a challenge for artists, technologists, planners and even local government leaders.  It will be lots of fun to see how this all develops.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/49933187503/art-in-the-city-or-the-city-as-art-part-2]

Art In The City Or The City As Art (Part 1)?

New forms of lighting, optics, connectivity and computer technologies have enabled artists to use the outdoors and other unusual settings as a new kind of canvass for their artwork.  Sometimes called projection mapping, here are some of the more interesting examples:

These are wonderful works of art.  BUT – all of these are expressions of art in a city, merely using the cityscape as the surface upon which an unrelated piece of artwork is laid.  These are not fully integrated with the city and don’t transform the city itself into art.

When I’ve spoken to audiences about the blending of physical and virtual space, I’ve had something much more ambitious in mind – the creation of new destinations and new experiences in a city which are attractive because they combine what’s there with virtual capabilities.  

This blending also provides residents and visitors a way of stretching and replicating time and space in the city.  Imagine showing in a location at night what it looked like in the morning or six months ago.  Imagine showing what is happening in another part of the city – particularly useful if you want those embarking trains or planes to learn of an event taking place elsewhere. 

Think about augmenting reality not through a smartphone camera or fancy glasses, but by augmenting reality in its place.  I’m certainly not alone is seeing the potential.  In his article “Augmented Reality Will Make Boring Cities Beautiful” [http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/cities/video-how-8216augmented-reality-will-make-boring-cities-beautiful/691] Christopher Mims notes that: 

“Once augmented reality is widespread, the difference between a great and a mediocre city won’t just be its built environment. To some extent, it will also be the degree to which that environment is a suitable tapestry for the creatives who will paint it with their augmented reality brush. Digital artists who learn to re-appropriate the city with the most innovative augmented reality add-ons won’t just bring themselves fame and fortune — they’ll also be attracting others to the places they love.”

Next week I’ll share a few examples of what has already been started.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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