Think I should start documenting my project for the Mixed Reality module as I’ve already made a considerable amount of progress so far.

a) Mixed Reality Platforms (50%) Delivered by Chris Speed

‘Experience is a system and consequently the objective world is constructed through the imposition of cultural categories on reality. Perception thus takes place through a mediating value-framework which differentiates the facticity of the environment in which one lives’, (Shields, 1991:32).

This is a site based project with that will be involve students working together in small groups, participants will design collaborative projects that share mixed reality platforms combining both physical (non-digital) and virtual (digital) materials.

It is anticipated that through an analysis of the site that the teams are given you will be expected to develop work in response to its environmental, technical, architectural and social properties. Students will be encouraged to use mobile and locative media where relevant to extend the potential dialogue with the geographical context.

The work represents the DAT 2nd Year Show for 2007/8, and teams will have to work together to ensure that a show team is able to put together appropriate organising and marketing to support such an event.

In the past this option has involved a collaboration with students from Dartington College for Arts and you can see the nature of this collaboration here…

My idea involves an online and offline based medium similar to that of the GroupHug.Us website where anonymously people can confess whatever guilty thoughts they have on their mind. I thought it would be an interesting idea to bring it to an offline and public situation where people can text in their confessions, which would then be displayed on a projection.
Anyone will be able to text in their confession or guilty secret to a specific number which will then be picked up by my Twitter account and then into it’s xml feed from the Twitter API. This will then be parsed into flash and dynamically updated each time a new text is sent in. I have integrated the idea of the 7 deadly sins, where I have created associated keywords for each sin into an array which will be picked up each time a new text is sent in.

At the moment the backend is pretty much finished, I just need to work on a pretty looking frontend and get some projection resolutions found out. Here’s where I am so far with some test keywords. The values at the bottom represent how many keywords have been parsed in, updating each time a new text is sent in.

Going to have a look at topologies and some other forms of data representation that will create some sort of body for my frontend. Prototype to be finished for next Tuesday, exhibition the week after!

Well not a dream, but two ideas I’m really proud of and keen on doing for the near future. I don’t want to give away the details too early but here’s some clues.

One is for Chris Speed’s module which will be using SMS technologies to allow people to anonymously confess their secrets or whatever they happen to feel guilty about. Similar to the www.grouphug.us website, but in a public manner.

The other is part of my negotiated project with Joasia, as I did my essay on digital graffiti, graffiti as a contemporary art practise and the idealogies of graffiti, this project will follow a similar theme which I may not reveal until I need to give my speech about it next week har.

I chose to work on Chris Speeds group doing Mixed Reality Platforms instead of Vlad’s doing Augmented Reality as I feel Chris’ allows me to experiment more with a variety of technologies, whereas Vlad’s is primarily video based and I have done a lot of video work before and it would be good to do something different.

‘Experience is a system and consequently the objective world is constructed through the imposition of cultural categories on reality. Perception thus takes place through a mediating value-framework which differentiates the facticity of the environment in which one lives’, (Shields, 1991:32).

This is a site based project with that will be involve students working together in small groups, participants will design collaborative projects that share mixed reality platforms combining both physical (non-digital) and virtual (digital) materials.

It is anticipated that through an analysis of the site that the teams are given you will be expected to develop work in response to its environmental, technical, architectural and social properties. Students will be encouraged to use mobile and locative media where relevant to extend the potential dialogue with the geographical context.

The work represents the DAT 2nd Year Show for 2007/8, and teams will have to work together to ensure that a show team is able to put together appropriate organising and marketing to support such an event.

In the past this option has involved a collaboration with students from Dartington College for Arts and you can see the nature of this collaboration here…

One of my first ideas was to project ‘Surround Video’. We have been using surround sound audio for years now and I researched looking into the idea of having surround video as well. Using a video iPod, the user will be watching a scene such as walking down a street, where the focus of the video is the pavement as the filmer walks down the street. Then, using a projector from the rear or above the head of the user, the surrounding scene which would be the road, shops and anything else around that scene that is being shown in the video iPod. I drew up a few diagrams as I was pretty keen on the idea but I felt it wasn’t as ambitious as it could be and would like to do something a bit more exciting.

I’m currently looking into more projection work, but working with mobile and possibly SMS technologies as well as audio interactions.

For my critical context essay I would like to look at the relationship between graffiti and digital art.

Graffiti and digital art were always going to breed: it was just unclear what the offspring would look like and whether it would thrive

Scien - 123Klan

Although graffiti still stands to be a predominantly hated artform, you cannot argue with its massive presence in modern day art and design whether it be commercial billboards and idents or simple typography. There seems to be some sort of double-standard on the issue however most agree that graffiti is a creative outlet which in turn has created various amounts of creative style that are used in current graphic design trends.
So digital art’s way of saying thankyou is by allowing accesible creativity from individuals all over the world to collaborate, innovate, showcase, research and experiment their ideas, styles and stories.

On the street and off, on the web, the barriers to being creative have never been lower

Marc Schiller - WoosterCollective.com

I find these relationships very interesting, how one has evolved the other in many forms and would like to delve further into them.

Quicknotes;

Explain graffiti in relation to art practice
What makes graffiti ‘art’
Relate back to brief

References; banksy, c3.org, GRL, deschamp,

After watching the video I hope that the ideas and messages that I wanted to convey were clear and understandable. The idea behind the video was simply taking the connotations of a spray can (illegal, freedom of speech, graffiti) and turning them on their head. I wanted to incorporate this with the idea that advertising is essentially a form of graffiti although nothing is done about removing it.
A lot of people have issues with the tremendous amount of advertising in public space which gave me inspiration to touch on, being able to include the ideas I had for my spray can model which is used as a tool of censorship that would allow its user to block out the advertisement billboards, posters or whatever form they are in. This way I have created parallel narratives which twist in the middle.
Using titles I felt I could create a narrative for the video which would include the viewer and try to provoke a reaction from them if they have any opinion on either advertising or graffiti. These titles tend to include questions that the viewer can reply to in their mind.
Usually I use a music track to create an atmosphere for the video but I felt that using the audio from the advertising footage helped make the viewer feel that they were physically in the sort of public environment such as a train station or on a city street. Whereas a music track may be quite distractive and not let the viewer concentrate on the image that was trying to be conveyed.

Overall I felt I have created an interesting and though provoking video which was done by just swapping the connotations of an object.

References:
Kaapital Video: Smack Studios

Handed in my simulacrum video yesterday, here is the final product exploring the connotation, history and other ideas of a spray can.

I used the idea of advertising as a form of ‘economic graffiti’ and turning the use of a spray can on its head and using it as a censorship device, rather than the ability to give an individual the freedom of speech.

In a bit of a rush so will post the rest of the work up this weekend sometime.

Just remember, it doesn’t matter how early you managed to finish the project and how much time you had spare, but remembering Steve Anson has your uni card which you need to hand your work in half an hour before the deadline is not as funny as it seems.

Click for bigger.

Thought it may be useful to put this up. I got 66 as my mark which is a little less than I was expecting, but not too bad for being on my own whereas most others were in pairs.

Here’s the feedback from Chris;

A clear story – good reason why its so lo-fi. Although you could have referencd some visual art in this area – riley etc. Be interesting to make the trails 1point – so much finer. I’m not sure your decision to ditch the colour banded one was right – you could have submitted 2 pieces instead!!! (can you recover the code and put both of them on your blog?). It’s a well made piece and your management of the project has been brilliant considering you’re on your own. Sound would be good. Presentation was ok – articulation was a little weak but you tell a fair story. Illustrations would have helped anchor the piece. And it was odd finishing with the Digg inspiration rather than starting with it

So next time, include drawings and more references in the presentation

Semantic Web The emerging Second-Generation Web that is an extension of the current, FIRST-GENERATION WEB. The concept of the Semantic Web was produced by Tim BERNERS-LEE, who has also coined the term. The main idea of the Semantic Web is to delegate many current human-specific Web activities to computers. This will be possible if Web data are expressed in a machine-readable format suitable for completely automate transactions. It can be achieved by adding several hierarchical levels of METADATA to Web data and using specialist technologies that can make use of these metadata. ’ [Vladimir Geroimenko. Dictionary of XML Technologies and the Semantic Web. New York, 2004]

A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful that people will buy a particular computer hardware, gaming console, and/or an operating system simply to run that program… There have been a number of new uses of the term. For instance the usefulness of e-mail drew many people to use the Internet, while the Mosaic web browser is generally credited with the initial rapid popularity of the World Wide Web. The term has also been applied to video games that cause consumers to buy a particular video game console to play them. ’ [Wikipedia.org]

Working in pairs, students are required:

- to investigate the most interesting and promising directions in the development of the Second Generation Web (also known as the Semantic Web or the XML-based Web);

- to propose a possible scenario for the future of the Web that can lead to creating a killer application for the Semantic Web;

- to simulate or implement the scenario and/or the killer application in a multimedia form using Flash XML (or any other relevant technologies, such as Shockwave/Director, DHTML/JavaScript or Java).

Doesn’t sound too bad, XML applications and a Russian lecturer with a laser.

Ubiquitous inter-connective technologies are enabling innovative and creative solutions to many problems in work, home or social life. These include PDA, digital video, Bluetooth, GPS, artificial intelligence, software agents, BroadFi, intelligent materials and so on. It promises to be the future of the computing paradigm as even more functionality is combined to support users’ requirements, real and imagined.

Your task is to put yourself in the shoes of a designer in a leading edge innovation company. You will produce a conceptual design of a solution to an interaction-design problem that you will define. You are free to choose the problem and type of system you design as long as it meets the criteria in this document. At the very least it should be a technical solution to an identified problem. Some suggested ideas you can use as stated, or inspiration can be found as a separate document – or you can use your own idea subject to approval.

For my Augmented Reality essay I have been looking at a range of problems that could be solved with future technologies. One that really struck me as interesting is how advanced the western military forces are, yet still have issues with major problems such as friendly fire (as shown in the recent Iraq war), the lack of communication between groups and roles and how the individual infantry soldier can be improved in many ways in battlefield scenarios using a head mounted display. Many of the problems encountered within the military such as the one above almost always is led to by a lack of communication which with the right facilities could easily be avoided. Other features of the system could include navigation routes and planning, survivability including health regulation, command and mission documentation, threat alerts and much much more that would put the military many steps ahead of their opponent.

Another thing that interested me was how the HUD’s and displays of many first person shooter games use Augmented Reality features, even though the game is technically virtual reality anyway. Could these features make a realistic difference in real life scenarios as they do on the games and are they accurately represented?

To start I have been looking at existing research and ideas, such as the UK’s FIST system which seem to be well on they way to actually developing a working model that can be implemented into the battlefield in the very near future (2015-2020) that shows for a future technology, it’s actually pretty close in reality.