The Equator Project
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.
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