Digital screens now line the walls of nearly every airport terminal, restaurant, convenience store, bar and waiting room in America. They have popped up in gas stations, taxis, schools and even on public buses. They wrap the exterior of L.A. Live and other major commercial complexes. And increasingly they rest in our palms, in the form of the iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones that many of us rely on, like Dante following Virgil, as we walk or ride through the city.
Eric Gordon, a professor of new media at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just won a MacArthur Foundation grant for their innovative new take on community planning using Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world which users explore as avatars. More…
First, they took away the cops parked at key intersections and replaced them with with mounted, overhead cameras. This idea didn’t start in my city, Seattle, but when it turned out to be a revenue-generator, even if it reduced safety, City Hall took to it with a vengeance.
When real-world and computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time, you have reached augmented reality (AR). Combining live video imagery with computer-generated graphics, motion-tracking and other data, Layar promises a mobile web where users can walk down a city street and receive real time demographic information, histories of buildings, and block-by-block news. and More…
The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.
Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?
Recently I have discovered the power of film and the increasingly egalitarian nature of this medium as a way to educate about place and community and to tell these compelling stories, and I continue to ponder where this might lead.
