The Equator Project
Posted: June 27th, 2002 | 2 Comments »Equator is a massive cross-
disciplinary effort involving
several UK academic
institutions and it contains
a whole load of
fascinating projects. I love things like this – huge
project herds such as MIT’s Oxygen
and Berkeley’s Endeavour (can’t find a working URL for that at the moment).
Equator is focused around “the integration of physical and digital
interaction”. This means they do a load of playing with VR, wearables, location-
aware devices, etc. There’s way too much to it to be able to go into any real
depth – I’m still running frantically around the website going, “Cor, look at
that! No, look at that!” and not paying attention to any one thing long
enough. Until I can focus enough to report on individual projects, here’s a quick
skim:
- Virtual/mixed reality:
The
Augurscope is a location-sensitive viewing portal, viewing from real into
virtual environments.
CAVE/Reactor is
an immersive VR system at UCL. (They’ve had it for years – it was going when I
was there) - Cityspace:
Simulation of Crowded Spaces runs a gorgeously-rendered realtime simulation
of thousands of avatars wandering through a virtual city.
Virtual
London takes it upwards to much larger-scale rendering.
These two make me think of various upcoming city-based games; both
The Getaway (which
I mentioned a few
days ago) and
SimCity 4. - Wearables:
Bristol’s Wearable Computing
project have some nifty toys, especially
PubCrawl, which uses an OnHandPC
(one of Moose‘s favourite toys) combined
with a GPS to tell you where the nearest pub is. Glad to see they’ve got their
priorities in order. - You know… for kids!:
The Hunting Of The
Snark is just one of
a bunch of
projects that Sussex’s
Interact Lab have been working
on, and all of them make me wish I was seven again. - But also:
EQUIP is the
middleware platform that most of this stuff runs on.
Domestic Probes are
collections of little objects designed to capture lots of random bits of feedback
about people’s living environments – dream recorders, notepads, pinhole cameras,
etc. It’s mostly low-tech (not a criticism) and looks gorgeous. It’s from the
Royal College of Art.
… and a bunch of other stuff that needs more looking at. It’s all way too cool
to cover easily.
Hi
)
I am in the process of programming b.there forum for creative convergence 2002 and would love to hear your thoughts on who and how to make the event most useful.
Todays convergence is not only between technologies, it is between everything. Boundaries are blurring. Old distinctions are dead.
Working in separate arenas leaves us unaware of new technical possibilities leaving our creative canvas unnecessarily limited. Future creativity will be about a convergence of ideas.
The b.there forum will be a space where creatives, both from inside and outside the media industries and the world of science can share work, knowledge bases and brainstorm with each other and cultural theorists about what creative possiblities the near future will bring.
b.tv”s ‘b.there’ forum has the unique role of synthesising, interweaving ideas from seemingly disperate disciplines and bodies of knowledge. We hope that this sharing of expertise between different sectors will allow the freedom to travel further into future experiment by extending creative palettes.
This years gathering will be themed around *play* – not consul, shoot-em-up, sit in a darkened room kind of games, but *play*, an almost childlike *wonder – what – if ness* triggered by an accelerated momentum and dizzying transformations in this networked age.
Play
that might help us to comprehend the rapidly changing world we live in
that provides a unique opportunity to experiment and to test ideas without taking commercial responsibity
as a means through which we explore new worlds, where we can be whoever or whatever we want to be. (Some obvious links to virtual worlds, avatars and immersive environments there
that helps us separate fantasy from reality, science fiction from science fact.
Really look forward to hearing from you soon
KKxx
Hi
)
I am in the process of programming b.there forum for creative convergence 2002 and would love to hear your thoughts on who and how to make the event most useful.
Todays convergence is not only between technologies, it is between everything. Boundaries are blurring. Old distinctions are dead.
Working in separate arenas leaves us unaware of new technical possibilities leaving our creative canvas unnecessarily limited. Future creativity will be about a convergence of ideas.
The b.there forum will be a space where creatives, both from inside and outside the media industries and the world of science can share work, knowledge bases and brainstorm with each other and cultural theorists about what creative possiblities the near future will bring.
b.tv”s ‘b.there’ forum has the unique role of synthesising, interweaving ideas from seemingly disperate disciplines and bodies of knowledge. We hope that this sharing of expertise between different sectors will allow the freedom to travel further into future experiment by extending creative palettes.
This years gathering will be themed around *play* – not consul, shoot-em-up, sit in a darkened room kind of games, but *play*, an almost childlike *wonder – what – if ness* triggered by an accelerated momentum and dizzying transformations in this networked age.
Play
that might help us to comprehend the rapidly changing world we live in
that provides a unique opportunity to experiment and to test ideas without taking commercial responsibity
as a means through which we explore new worlds, where we can be whoever or whatever we want to be. (Some obvious links to virtual worlds, avatars and immersive environments there
that helps us separate fantasy from reality, science fiction from science fact.
Really look forward to hearing from you soon
KKxx