Tagwhat is a new social augmented reality network that lets you create and share augmented reality with others, for business or pleasure. With on-line and mobile versions, Tagwhat offers a unique experience to every user with its novel approach to combining augmented reality with social networking. Users own the entire globe with Tagwhat. Share your world and see why Tagwhat matters.
changing attitude towards 3D
Chromaroma Visualisations from Mudlark on Vimeo.
Chromaroma is a game that shows you your movements and location as you swipe your Oyster Card in and out of the Tube.
It connects communities of people who cross paths and routes on a regular basis, and encourages people to make new journeys and use public transport in a different way by exploring new areas and potentially using different modes of public transport.
Chromaroma is an online multiplayer game played out as you travel the city with your Oyster Card. By using Oyster data we are able to show you your Tube travel, and every journey means you amass points, taking a few steps further along the way to owning London.
Chromaroma is a type of location-based top-trumps. You collect places, identities, modes of transport and passengers as you travel around the city; discover and investigate mysteries attached to different locations and build alliances with fellow passengers that share your journeys. It’s a game you can play on your own, or part of a team.
The game will launch late in 2010. You can sign up for the private beta here
Beyond Facebook, beyond consoles and even computer screens, games are becoming the medium for everyday life. Games are invading the real world — and the runaway popularity of Farmville and Guitar Hero is just the beginning.
This additional layer that’s being progressively laid on top of our communication experiences is one of the key drivers making the whole media ecosystem more immersive.
At the DICE Summit, Jesse Schell makes a startling prediction: a future where 1-ups and experience points break “out of the box” and into every part of our daily lives.
See New York City, NY in Google Earth with new, high-quality 3D imagery (street level detail). Download Google Earth at http://earth.google.com
All it needs now is an avatar system…
The “Temple of Time” is a three-dimensional projection of historical chronography. In the temple, the vertical columns represent centuries, with those on the right showing names of important figures from the Old World while those on the left show figures from the New World. The floor shows a historical stream chart. The ceiling functions as a chart of biography.
The “Temple of Time,” created in 1846 by the pioneering American girls’ educator Emma Willard, draws on the tradition of Renaissance “memory theaters,” mnemonic devices that allowed people to memorize information by imagining it as architectural details in a three-dimensional mental space.
“Those laws of mind by which not only the memory is assisted, but the intellect formed, have been regarded in this invention. The attempt to understand chronology by merely committing dates to memory, is not only painful, but it is as useless as to learn latitudes and longitudes without the study of maps. As in geography, the relation of any place to all other places is what is important to know; so in chronology, the relation which any given event bears to others constitutes the only useful knowledge. Whosever wishes, can here locate himself in any point of time, and see what characters are cotemporary [sic], what before, and what to follow. This saves great labor of thought, and may suggest new ideas, even to the learned.
By putting the course of time into perspective, the disconnected parts of a vast subject are united in one, and comprehended at a glance; — the poetic idea of “the vista of departed years”[*] is made an object of sight; and when the eye is the medium, the picture will by frequent inspection, be formed within, and forever remain, wrought into the living texture of the mind. If this be done by a design whose beauty and grandeur naturally attract attention, then the teacher or parent who shall place it before his pupils and children, will find that they will insensibly become possessed of an inner “Temple” in which they may, through life, deposit, in the proper order of time, the facts of history as they shall acquire them. This, we repeat, is as important to the student of time as maps are to the student of place. Nations are here exhibited both ethnographically and chronographically. With any of the most celebrated characters of the world, we may in idea stand within the “Temple,” andlook back to the past, and forward to the future.”
Spotted in the awesome book I just unwrapped “Cartopgraphies of Time: A History of the Timeline”
At Calit2 on the UC San Diego campus, researchers are finding new ways to interact with data. Here, project scientist Jurgen Schulze demonstrates a 3D interactive tour of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi”, using a Flock of Birds virtual-reality system and software that permits the viewer to “walk into” the painting. As researcher and “art detective” Maurizio Seracini demonstrates, taking steps toward the projection of the painting allows the user to move from the surface of the Adoration to the layer displaying an infrared image of the painting — which displays the original “underdrawing” by da Vinci. Seracini’s research confirmed that while da Vinci drew the underdrawing, others applied the sometimes erratic brown hue that characterizes the painting today on display in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery.
T_Visionarium 360 3D Installation from Karel & Sjaak on Vimeo.
T_Visionarium was created for the UNSW iCinema Centre’s Advanced Interaction and Visualisation Environment (AVIE), and it offers the means to capture and re-present televisual information, allowing viewers to explore and actively edit a multitude of stories in three dimensions. For T_Visionarium, 28 hours of digital free-to-air Australian television was captured over a period of one week. This footage was segmented and converted into a large database containing over 20,000 video clips. Each clip was then tagged with descriptors—or metadata—defining its properties. The information encoded includes the gender of the actors, the dominant emotions they are expressing, the pace of the scene, and specific actions such as standing up, lying down, and telephoning. Dismantling the video data in this way breaks down the original linear narrative into components that then become the building blocks for a new kind of interactive television.
Two hundred and fifty video clips are simultaneously displayed and distributed around AVIE’s huge circular screen. Using a special interface the viewer can select, re-arrange and link these video clips at will, composing them into combinations based on relations of gesture and movement. By these means the experience of viewing the television screen is not so much superseded as reformatted, magnified, proliferated and intensified. It is the experience of this new kind of spatial connectivity that gives rise to a revolutionary way of seeing and reconceptualizing TV in its aesthetic, physical and semantic dimensions. To use the T_Visionariumapparatus is not to view a screen or even multiple screens, but to experience a space within which screen imagery is dynamically re-formulated and re-imagined.
T_Visionarium actively and ongoingly explicates television but most importantly, it engages the domain in which it operates. Here, media is not an object of study but a material landscape in which we are component parts. T_Visionarium is a useable technology that locates us within a mediascape and makes us actutely aware of its operations, uncovering a televisual vocabulary of gesture. Stripped of its conventional narrative context, the aesthetic, behavioural and media qualities of television become strikingly apparent. And by affording us an active involvement T_Visionarium hones both our awareness of and our dexterity with this media.
In essence, it is not so much a tool that delivers control of a mediascape but a mode of inhabiting our surroundings: a sphere of pure and endless mediality. In this and many other ways, T_Visionarium is a moment in the history of media: post cinema, post narrative, new media, but at the same time, a major study in television and an embodiment of a new, media aesthetics.
Jill Bennett (Cf: Jill Bennett, T_Vi sionarium : A User’s Guide, ZKM/UNSW Press, Karlsruhe/Sydney: 2008)
More (a lot more) on iCinema
Credits
Project Directors: Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Matthew McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel
Lead Software Engineer: Matthew McGinity
Distributed Video Engine: Balint Seeber
Application Software: Jared Berghold, Ardrian Hardjono, Gunawan Herman, Tim Kreger, Thi Thanh Nga Nguyen, Multimedia and Video Communication Research Group (Dr Jack Yu) NICTA
Co-Ordination and Interaction Design: Dennis Del Favero, Volker Kuchelmeister, Matthew McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw
Management: Damian Leonard, Sue Midgley
Assistants: Caitlin Fraser, David McKenzie, Gabriel Nervo
Audio Software: Tim Kreger
This project was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery funding scheme and produced by iCinema Centre and co-produced by ZKM, Karlsruhe.
Not new to massive made environments like the ski dome, Dubai unveiled yesterday plans to build the Technosphere, a massive biosphere that would be the heart of the new Technopark. This pioneering new development explores sustainable technologies and the planning principals to create a desert community that will be carbon neutral and zone waste.
The concept of this iconic building for the Technopark of Dubai, is a building which will reflect the state of Planet Earth in the current and future times. Planet Earth embodies the very essence of the ecosystem that we live in. This concept takes the planet’s ecosystem and interprets it as a Cybertecture building that mimics the forces of nature to produce a building that is wonder for people to visit, live and work in, and be a symbol of the power of Technology. This building, being the iconic symbol of the Technopark will be called ‘Technosphere’.
The Technosphere has several key technology systems and architectural spaces that will enable the building to generate a self breathing environment as well as generate electricity from solar power to supplement the energy needs of the building. An intelligently distributed array of sky gardens for offices and hotel not only gives a outdoor terrace advantage to the occupants but also provide passive solar shielding from the sun as well as natural green plantations to contribute oxygen to the environment in a sustainable way. Other systems such as water recycling minimises the use and wastages of water in this vast building.
In addition to observing how environments respond to climate change, the Technosphere may also be used to prove the feasibility of recreations of earth in space, with water recycling and air-purifying (or “self-breathing”) gardens highlighted as major components.
The Technosphere sits on the axis of the new city plan of Technopark, creating a symbolic termination of the axis as if its location is the genesis of the city. From this point, the city seems to grow, and deliberately, the Techosphere is awesome in its presence as the nucleus of the City. [via WAN]
