I’ve concluded that the promise of RFID was eclipsed by another technology out there that’s poised to become more and more disruptive, not only to RFID, but to a host of technologies, and that’s the CCD.

from CCD by Joe Gregorio. Via BERG.

Cameras might allow a photographer to record a scene and then alter the lighting or shift the point of view, or even insert fictitious objects.

from Computational Photography, American Scientist

The camera as a device you carry has completely disappeared. Image sensors have become part of the literal fabric of everyday life.

from What Photography Will Look Like By 2060

“Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation” a PhD by Sam Kinsley.

via Anne

Curious Displays by Julia Yu Tsao

Below are some clippings of bits that seem particularly insightful:

It puts own embodiment at risk. And whomsoever can mitigate that risk while providing reward will probably do well. I believe that organizations such as Apple and Google see this and are pursuing not merely real-time, or hyper-local or crowd-sourced apps but ownership of the “view”.

...

Everybody wants a part of the lens of reality, the zero-click base layer beneath the beneath. As Gene Becker puts it “The World is the Platform”. And an ecosystem is starting to emerge.

...

Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds.

...

[I]nterfaces move from being heavy and solid with big heavy buttons and knobs and rotary dials to becoming liquid and effortless like the dynamic UI of the iPhone to becoming like air itself.

...

By making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet.

...

There will be user interface interaction issues. What will be the conventions for hand-swipes, grabs, drags, pulls and other operations to manipulate objects in our field of view.

...

[AR] is not simply “memory” – it isn’t just a mnemonic that helps bring understanding closer to the surface of consciousness. Clearly we are surrounded by our own memories, signage, advertising, radio, friends voices and an already rich complicated teeming natural landscape loaded with signifiers and cues. But it is another bridge between personal lived experience and the experience of others. It seems to lower costs of knowing, and it seems to provide stronger subjective filters.

...

Augmented Reality seems to at least offer the possibility that we can punch some holes in the boxes. It seems to offer a bridge between structure and chaos rather than just structure.

17 January.

09 January, 11.44

On that afternoon we didn’t have a printer handy for making the AR marks, so we took to drafting them by hand, stencilling them off the screen with a pencil and inking them in. This hand-crafted process led to all sorts of interesting connections between the possibilities of craft and digital information.

We had lots of ideas about printing the markers on clothes, painting them on nails, glazing them into ceramics, etc. We confused ARtoolkit by drawing markers in perspective, and tried to get recursive objects by using screen based markers and video feedback.

Now as it turns out there is an entire research programme dedicated to looking at just this topic. Variable Environment is a research programme involving partners like ECAL and EPFL. The great thing is that they are blogging the entire exploratory (they call it ‘sketch’) phase and curating the results online. The work is multi-disciplinary and involves architects, visual designers, computer scientists, interaction designers, etc. Check out the simple AR ready products, sample applications and mixed reality tests with various patterns.

This seems to be part of a shift in the research community, to publishing ongoing and exploratory work online (championed by the likes of Nicolas Nova and Anne Galloway). Very inspirational.

Underneath the desk I have stuck a grid of RFID tags, and on the top surface, the same grid of post-it notes. With the standard Nokia Service Discovery application it is possible to call people, send pre-defined SMSes or load URLs by touching the phone to each post-it on the desk. On the post-its themselves I have hand-written the function, message and the recipient. This is somewhat like a cross between a phone-book, to-do list and temporary diary, with notes, scribbles and tea stains alongside names.

Initial ideas were to spraypaint or silkscreen some of the touch icons to the desk surface, and I may well do that at some point. But for quick prototyping it made sense to use address labels or post-it notes that can be stuck, re-positioned and layered with hand-written notes.

This is an initial step in thinking about the use of RFID and mobile phones, a way of thinking through making. In many ways it is proving to be more inconvenient than the small screen (particularly with the occasionally unreliable firmware on this particular cover, I can’t speak for the production version). But it has highlighted some really interesting issues.

First of all it has brought to the forefront the importance of implicit habits. Initially, it took a real effort to think about the action of using the table as an interface: I would reach for the phone and press names to make a call, instead of placing it on the desk. But for some functions, such as sending an SMS, it has become more habitual.

SMSes have become more like ‘pings’ when very little effort is made to send them. At the same time they are more physically tangible: I rest the phone in a certain position on the desk and wait for it to complete an action. The most useful functions have been “I’m here” or “I’m leaving” messages to close friends.

I have had to consider the ‘negative space’ where the mobile must rest without any action. This space has potential be used for context information; a corner of the table could make my phone silent, another corner could change my presence online. Here it would be interesting to refer to Jan Chipchase’s ideas around centres of gravity and points of reflection, it’s these points that could be most directly mapped to behaviour. I’m thinking about other objects and spaces that might be appropriate for this, and perhaps around the idea of thoughtless acts.

If this was a space without wireless internet, I could also imagine this working very well for URLs: quick access to google searches, local services or number lookups, which is usually very tricky on a small screen. Here it would be interesting to think about how the mobile is used in non-connected places, such as the traditional Norwegian Hytte [pdf].

This process also raised a larger issue around the move towards tangible or physical information, which also implies a move towards the social. As I was making the layout of my address book and associated functions, I realised that maybe these things shouldn’t be explicit, visible, social objects. The arrangement of people within the grid makes personal sense; the placement is a personal preference and maps in certain ways to frequency and type of contact. But I wonder how it appears to other people when this pattern is exposed. Will people be offended by my layout? What if I don’t include a rarely called contact? Are there numbers I want to keep secret, hidden behind acronyms in the ‘Names’ menu?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out and changes over time, particularly in the reaction of others. I’ll post more about the use of NFC in other personal contexts in the near future.

The making of…

The desk is made from 20 mm birch ply, surfaced in Linoleum. I stuck a single RFID to the underside, in the place that felt most natural. A 10 cm grid was worked out from that point, and the RFIDs were stuck in that grid, and the same worked out on top. If I were to re-build the desk with this project in mind, the tags should probably be layered close to the surface, between the ply and Linoleum. This would make them slightly more responsive to touch by giving them a larger read/write distance.

Rewriteable 512 bit, Philips MiFare UL stickers.

10 cm grid of tags on the underside of the desk.

Blank post-it notes on the surface, with the same grid.

More photos at Flickr.

Overall the interaction between phone and RFID tags has been good. The reader/writer is on the base of the phone, at the bottom. This seems a little awkward to use at first, but slowly becomes natural. When I have given it to others, their immediate reaction is to point the top of the phone to the tag, and nothing happens. There follows a few moments of explaining as the intricacies of RFID and looking at the phone, with it’s Nokia ‘fingerprint’ icon. As phones increasingly become replacements for ‘contactless cards’, it seems likely that this interaction will become more habitual and natural.

Once the ‘service discovery’ application is running, the read time from tags is really quick. The sharp vibrations and flashing lights add to a solid feeling of interacting with something, both in the haptic and visual senses. This should turn out to be a great platform for embodied interaction with information and function.

The ability to read and write to tags makes it potentially adaptive as a platform wider than just advertising or ticketing. As an interaction designer I feel quite enabled by this technology: the three basic functions (making phonecalls, going to URLs, or sending SMSs) are enough to start thinking about tangible interactions without having to go and program any Java midlets or server-side applications.

I’m really happy that Nokia is putting this technology into a ‘low-end’ phone rather than pushing it out in a ‘smartphone’ range. This is where there is potential for wider usage and mass-market applications, especially around gaming and content discovery.

Improvements

I had some problems launching the ‘service discovery’ application. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and it’s difficult to tell why this is. It would be great to be able to place the phone on the table, knowing that it will respond to a tag, but it was just a little too unreliable to do that without checking to see that it had responded. The version I have still says it’s a prototype, so this may well be sorted out by the released version.

Overall there is a lack of integration between the service discovery application and the rest of the system: Contacts, SMS archive and service bookmarks etc. At the moment we need to enter the application to write and manage tags, or to give a ‘shortcut’ to another phone, but it seems that, as with bluetooth and IR, this should be part of the contextual menus that appear under ‘Options’ within each area of the phone. There are also some infuriating prompts that appear when interacting with URL, more details below.

Details

The phone opens the ‘service discovery’ application whenever it detects a compatible RFID tag near the base of the phone (when the keypad lock is off). This part is a bit obscure: sometimes it doesn’t ‘wake up’ for a tag, and the application needs to be loaded before it will read properly. Once the application is open (about 2-3 seconds) the read time of the tags seems instantaneous.

The shortcuts menu gives access to shortcuts. Confusingly, this is different from ‘bookmarks’ and the ‘names’ list on the phone, although names can be searched from within the application. I think tighter integration with the OS is called for.

Shortcuts can be added, edited, deleted, etc. in the same way as contacts. They can be ‘Given’ to another phone or ‘Written’ to a tag.

There are three kinds of shortcuts: Call, URL or SMS. ‘Call’ will create a call to a pre-defined number, ‘URL’ will load a pre-defined URL, and ‘SMS’ will send a pre-defined SMS to a particular number. This part of the application has the most room for innovative extensions: we should be able to set the state of the phone, change profiles, change themes, download graphics, etc. This can be achieved by loading URLs, but URLs and mobiles don’t mix, so why should we be presented with them, when there could be a more usable layer inbetween? There could also be preferences for prompts: at the moment each action has to be confirmed with a yes or a no, but in some secure environments it would be nice to be able to have a function launched without the extra button push.

If a tag contains no data, then we are notified and placed back on the main screen (as happened when I tried to write to my Oyster card).

If the tag is writeable we are asked which shortcut to write to the tag.

When we touch a tag with a shortcut on it, a prompt appears asking for confirmation. This is a level of UI to prevent mistakes, and a certain level of security, but it also reduces the overall usability of the system. With URL launching, there are two stages of confirmation, which is infuriating. There needs to be some other mode of confirmation, and the ‘service discovery’ app needs to somehow be deeper in the system to avoid these double button presses.

Lastly, there is a log of actions. Useful to see if the application has been reading something in your bag or wallet, without you knowing…

I’m interested in the visual link between information and physical things. How do we represent an object that has digital function, information or history beyond it’s physical form? What are the visual clues for this interaction? We shouldn’t rely on a kind of mystery meat navigation (the scourge of the web-design world) where we have to touch everything to find out it’s meaning.

This work doesn’t attempt to be a definitive system for marking physical things, it is an exploratory process to find out how digital/physical interactions might work. It uncovers interesting directions while the technology is still largely out of the hands of everyday users.

Reference to existing work

Click for larger version.

The inspiration for this is in the marking of public space and existing iconography for interactions with objects: push buttons on pedestrian crossings, contactless cards, signage and instructional diagrams.

This draws heavily on the substantial body of images of visual marking in public space. One of the key findings of this research was that visibility and placement of stickers in public space is an essential part of their use. Current research in ubicomp and ‘locative media’ is not addressing these visibility issues.

There is also a growing collection of existing iconography in contactless payment systems, with a number of interesting graphic treatments in a technology-led, vernacular form. In Japan there are also instances of touch-based interactions being represented by characters, colours and iconography that are abstracted from the action itself.

I have also had great discussions with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engestr�m who have been doing interesting work with thinglinks and the intricate weaving of RFID into craft products.

Development

Sketching and development revealed five initial directions: circles, wireless, card-based, mobile-based and arrows (see the poster for more details). The icons range from being generic (abstracted circles or arrows to indicate function) to specific (mobile phones or cards touching tags).

Arrows might be suitable for specific functions or actions in combinations with other illustrative material. Icons with mobile phones or cards might be helpful in situations where basic usability for a wide range of users is required. Although the ‘wireless’ icons are often found in current card readers, they do not successfully indicate the touch-based interactions inherent in the technology, and may be confused with WiFi or Bluetooth. The circular icons work at the highest level, and might be most suitable for generic labelling.

For further investigation I have selected a simple circle, surrounded by an ‘aura’ described by a dashed line. I think this successfully communicates the near field nature of the technology, while describing that the physical object contains something beyond its physical form.

In most current NFC implementations, such as the 3220 from Nokia and many iMode phones, the RFID reader is in the bottom of the phone. This means that the area of ‘activation’ is obscured in many cases by the phone and hand. The circular iconography allows for a space to be marked as ‘active’ by the size of the circle, and we might see it used to mark areas rather than points. Usability may improve when these icons are around the same size as the phone, rather than being a specific point to touch.

Work in progress

This is early days for this technology, and this is work-in-progress. There is more to be done in looking at specific applications, finding suitable uses and extending the language to cover other functions and content.

Until now I have been concerned with generic iconography for a digitally augmented object. But this should develop into a richer language, as the applications for this type of interaction become more specific, and related to the types of objects and information being used. For example it would be interesting to find a graphic treatment that could be applied to a Pokemon sticker offering power-ups as well as a bus stop offering timetable downloads.

I’m also interested in the physical placement of these icons. How large or visible should they be? Are there places that should not be ‘active’? And how will this fit with the natural, centres of gravity of the mobile phone in public and private space.

I’ll expand on these things in a few upcoming projects that explore touch-based interactions in personal spaces.

Feel free to use and modify the icons, I would be very interested to see how they can be applied and extended.

Visual references

Oyster Card, Transport for London.
eNFC, Inside Contactless.
Paypass, Mastercard.
ExpressPay, American Express.
FeliCa, Sony.
MiFare, various vendors.
Suica, JR, East Japan Railway Company.
RFID Field Force Solutions, Nokia.
NFC shell for 3220, Nokia.
ERG Transit Systems payment, Dubai.
Various generic contactless vendors.
Contactless payment symbol, Mastercard.
Open Here, Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Westendorp, Thames and Hudson, 1999.
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud, Harper, 1994

(Based on Dourish, see reading recommendations, below)

Each successive development in computer history has made greater use of human skills:

• electrical: required a thorough understanding of electrical design
• symbolic: required a thorough understanding of the manipulation of abstract languages
• textual: text dialogue with the computer: set the standards of interaction we still we live with today

• graphic: graphical dialogue with the computer, using our spatial skills, pattern recognition, and motion memory with a mouse and keyboard

  We have become stuck in this last model.

  Interaction with computers has remained largely the same: desk, screen, input devices, etc. Even entirely new fields like mobile and iTV have followed these interaction patterns.

  Definitions:

• Tangible: physical: having substance or material existence; perceptible to the senses

• Social: human and collaborative abilities, or ‘software that’s better because there’s people there’ (Definition from Matt Jones and Matt Webb)

  Examples

  Dourish notes in the first few chapters of his book that as interaction with computers moves out into the world, it becomes part of our social world too. The social and the tangible are intricately linked as part of “being in the world”.

  What follows are examples of products or services we can use or buy right now. I’m specifically interested in the ways that these theories of ubiquitous computing and tangible interaction are moving out into the world, and the way that we can see the trends in currently available products.

  I’m aware that there are also terrifically interesting things happening in research (eg the Tangible Media Group) but right now I’m interested in the emergent things that start to happen effects of millions of people using things (like Flickr, weblogs, Nintendo DS, and mobile social software).

  Social trends on the web

  On the web the current trend is building simple platforms that support complex social/human behaviour

• Weblogs, newsreaders and RSS: simple platform that has changed the way the web works, and supported simple social interaction (the basic building blocks of dialogue, or conversation)
• Flickr: a simple platform for media/photo sharing: turned into a thriving community: works well with the web by allowing syndicated photos, bases the social network on top of a defined funciton

• Others include del.icio.us, world of warcraft, etc.

  Social mobile computing

  On mobile platforms most of the exciting stuff is happening around presence, context and location

• Familiar strangers: stores a list of all the phones that you have been near in places that you inhabit, and then visualises the space around you according to who you have met before. More mobile social software

• Mogi: location based game, but most interestingly supports different contexts of use: both at home in front of a big screen, and out on a small mobile screen.

  Social games

  Interesting that games are moving away from pure immersive 3D worlds, and starting to devote equal attention to their situated, social context

• Nintendo DS: PictoChat, local wireless networks that can be adapted for gameplay or communication (picture chatting included as standard)
• Sissyfight: very simple social game structure, encourages human behaviour, insults
• Habbohotel: simple interaction structures, (and fantastic attention to detail in iconic representations) support human desires. Now a very large company, in over 12 countries, based on the sales of virtual furniture

• Singstar: entirely social game, about breaking social barriers and mutual humiliation: realtime analysis/visualisation of your voice actually makes you sing worse!

  Tangible games

• Eyetoy: Brings the viewer into the screen, creates a performative and social space, and allows communication via PS2
• Dance Dance Revolution: taking the television into physical space
• Nokia wave-messaging: puts information back into space, and creates social and performative opportunities (Photo thanks to Matt Webb)

• Yellow Arrow: puts digital information into city space, gives us a glimpse of the way that we might have more interaction with situated information in the future

  There are also very interesting aspects of gender in all of this: this move towards the social implies a move towards the type of games/play that is seen more often in girls.

  Recommended reading

  Where the Action Is, Paul Dourish (Read the first 3 chapters for a great introduction)

  Digital Ground, Malcolm McCullough (Exploring the relationship between architectural and digital spaces)

  Physical Computing, O�Sullivan, Igoe (Practical book on making physical computing devices)

  Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold (Exploring wider social aspects of mobile technology)

  The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin (Covers screen based interaction, but has the best discussion on ‘modes’ of any book)

  Mind Hacks, Matt Webb and Tom Stafford (Looks at our interaction with the world from the perspective of neuroscience, great introduction to ‘affordances’)

  ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/03/tangible-and-social-interaction/feed 3 http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:28:07 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects These are some of my notes from his lecture, and our discussion over lunch.

  The aim of the Soundobject research is to liberate interaction design from visual dominance, to free up our eyes, and to do what small displays don’t do well.

  Reasons for focusing on sound:

  • Sound is currently under-utilised in interaction design
  • Vision is overloaded and our auditory senses are seldom engaged
  • In the world we are used to hearing a lot
  • Adding sound to existing, optimised visual interfaces does not add much to usability

    Sound is very good at attracting our attention, so we have alarms and notification systems that successfully use sound in communication and interaction. We talked about using ‘caller groups’ on mobile phones where people in an address book can be assigned different ringtones, and how effective it was in changing our relationship with our phones. In fact it’s possible to sleep through unimportant calls: our brains are processing and evaluating sound while we sleep.

    One fascinating thing that I hadn’t considered is that sound is our fastest sense: it has an extremely high temporal resolution (ten times faster than vision), so for instance our ears can hear pulses at a much higher rate than our eyes can watch a flashing light.

    Disadvantages of sound objects

    Sound is not good for continuous representation because we cannot shut out sound in the way we can divert our visual attention. It’s also not good for absolute display: pitch, loudness and timbre are relative to most people, even people that have absolute pitch can be affected by contextual sounds. And context is a big issue: loud or quiet environments affect the way that sound must be used in interfaces: libraries and airplanes for example.

    There are also big problems with spatial representation in sound, techniques that mimic the position of sound based on binaural differences are inaccessible by about a fifth of the population. This perception of space in sound is also intricately linked with the position and movement of the head. Some Google searches on spatial representation of sound. See also Psychophysical Scaling of Sonification Mappings [pdf]

    Cartoonification

    ‘Filling a bottle with water’ is a sound that could work as part of an interface, representing actions such as downloading, uploading or in replacement of progress bars. The sound can be abstracted into a ‘cartoonification’ that works more effectively: the abstraction separates simulated sounds from everyday sounds.

    Mikael cites inspiration from foley artists working on film sound design, that are experienced in emphasising and simplifying sound actions, and in creating dynamic sound environments, especially in animation.

    A side effect of this ‘cartoonification’ is that sounds can be generated in simpler ways: reducing processing and memory overhead in mobile devices. In fact all of the soundobject experiments rely on parametric sound synthesis using PureData: generated on the fly rather than using sampled sound files, resulting in small, fast, adaptive interface environments (sound files and the PD files used to generate the sounds can be found at the Soundobject site).

    One exciting and pragmatic idea that Mikael mentioned was simulating ‘peas in a tin’ to hear how much battery is left in a mobile device. Something that seems quite possible, reduced to mere software, with the accelerometer in the Nokia 3220. Imagine one ‘pea’ rattling about, instead of one ‘bar’ on a visual display…

    Research conclusions

    The most advanced prototype of a working sound interface was a box that responded to touch, and had invisible soft-buttons on it’s surface that could only be heard through sound. The synthesised sounds responded to the movement of the fingertips across a large touchpad like device (I think it was a tactex device). These soft-buttons used a simplified sound model that synthesised impact, friction and deformation. See Human-Computer Interaction Design based on Interactive Sonification [pdf]

    The testing involved asking users to feel and hear their way around a number of different patterns of soft-buttons, and to draw the objects they found. See these slides for some of the results.

    The conclusions were that users were almost as good at using sound interfaces as with normal soft-button interfaces and that auditory displays are certainly a viable option for ubiquitous, especially wearable, computing.

    More reading

    Soundobject
    Gesture Controlled Audio Systems
    ICAD

    ]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/sound-objects/feed 2 http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/touch-interface-photos http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/touch-interface-photos#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:00:36 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/photos-of-touch-based-interfaces In the way that Victor Lombardi is collecting images of cardreaders, I am beginning to collect images of touch-based interfaces like the Oyster card and other 'touchable' interfaces on public transport. If you want to contribute, tag your photos with 'touchinterface'.]]> In the way that Victor Lombardi is collecting images of cardreaders, I am beginning to collect images of touch-based interfaces like the Oyster card and other 'touchable' interfaces on public transport. If you want to contribute, tag your photos with 'touchinterface'.]]> http://www.elasticspace.com/2005/02/touch-interface-photos/feed 1 http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:13:00 +0000 Timo http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/11/spatial-memory-design-engaged my presentation [pdf] and presentation notes from Design Engaged 2004. Lots of pretty pictures of stickers, tags, flyposting and such. I will chip in with Dan, Adam, Matt, Molly and Fabio to say that this has been the conference highlight of the year.]]> Notes on two related projects:

    1. Time that land forgot

    • A project in collaboration with Even Westvang
    • Made in 10 days at the Icelandic locative media workshop, summer 2004
    • Had the intention of making photo archives and gps trails more useful/expressive
    • Looked at patterns in my photography: 5 months, 8000 photos, visualised them by date / time of day. Fantastic resource for me: late night parties, early morning flights, holidays and the effect of midnight sun is visible.
    • Looking now to make it useful as part of more pragmatic interface, to try other approaches less about the abstracted visualisation
    • prototype
    • info, details, research and source code
    • time visualisation

      2. Marking in urban public space

      I’ve also been mapping stickering, stencilling and flyposting: walking around with the camera+gps and photographing examples of marking (not painted graffiti).

      

      This research looks at the marking of public space by investigating the physical annotation of the city: stickering, stencilling, tagging and flyposting. It attempts to find patterns in this marking practice, looking at visibility, techniques, process, location, content and audience. It proposes ways in which this marking could be a layer between the physical city and digital spatial annotation.

      Some attributes of sticker design

    • Visibility: contrast, monochromatic, patterns, bold shapes, repetition
    • Patina: history, time, decay, degredation, relevance, filtering, social effects
    • Physicality: residue of physical objects: interesting because these could easily contain digital info
    • Adaptation and layout: layout is usually respectful, innovative use of dtp and photocopiers, adaptive use of sticker patina to make new messages on top of old

      

      Layers of information build on top of each other, as with graffiti, stickers show their age through fading and patina, flyposters become unstuck, torn and covered in fresh material. Viewed from a distance the patina is evident, new work tends to respect old, and even commercial flyposting respects existing graffiti work.

      

      Techniques vary from strapping zip-ties through cardboard and around lampposts for large posters, to simple hand-written notes stapled to trees, and short-run printed stickers. One of the most fascinating and interactive techniques is the poster offering strips of tear-off information. These are widely used, even in remote areas.

      

      Initial findings show that stickers don’t relate to local space, that they are less about specific locations than about finding popular locations, “cool neighbourhoods” or just ensuring repeat exposure. This is opposite to my expectations, and perhaps sheds some light on current success/failure of spatial annotation projects.

      I am particularly interested in the urban environment as an interface to information and an interaction layer for functionality, using our spatial and navigational senses to access local and situated information.

      There is concern that in a dense spatially annotated city we might have an overload of information, what about filtering and fore-grounding of relevant, important information? Given that current technologies have very short ranges (10-30mm), we might be able to use our existing spatial skills to navigate overlapping information. We could shift some of the burden of information retrieval from information architecture to physical space.

      I finished by showing this animation by Kriss Salmanis, a young Latvian artist. Amazing re-mediation of urban space through stencilling, animation and photography. (“Un ar reizi naks tas bridis” roughly translates as “And in time the moment will come”.

      Footnotes/references

      Graffiti Archaeology, Cassidy Curtis
      otherthings.com/grafarc

      Street Memes, collaborative project
      streetmemes.com

      Spatial annotation projects list
      elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation

      Nokia RFID kit for 5140
      nokia.com/nokia/0,,55739,00.html

      Spotcodes, High Energy Magic
      highenergymagic.com/spotcode

      ?Mystery Meat navigation?, Vincent Flanders
      fixingyourwebsite.com/mysterymeat.html

      RDF as barcodes, Chris Heathcote
      undergroundlondon.com/antimega/archives/2004_02.html

      Implementation: spatial literature
      nickm.com/implementation

      Yellow Arrow
      yellowarrow.org

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