interaction | urbantick

Floods – Changes Over Time

By: admin_urbantick

08-03-2011

Australia has only just recently suffered the worst flooding in years, with large areas of the East Coast under water. Brisbane was hit very hard with high waterlevels over days.
ABC-News has put together a coverage story showing in detail the impact of the flooding before and after. It is a sort of time warp representation between two given dates. Click HERE for the slider version 01 and HERE for the slider version 02.

The visualisation is based on date from the nearmap service. They are providing detailed resolution time aerial maps, just like google maps does but with an integrated time slider. Google offers a similar tool in Google Earth to see older imagery, but nearmap offers more and much shorter timespans between the dates. So it happens they also have imagery ready from right during the flooding.

Rosalie Village [Click for original nearmap]

Cleverly the imagery is overlaid and allows to drag the before stage to reveil the after, showing water everywhere. Of course the images line up perfectly with the difference of what happend to the place in the mean time.

Milton (Lang Park) [Click for original nearmap]
Milton (Lang Park) (before flooding)
Milton (Lang Park) (after flooding)

Floating pallets in Rocklea industrial estate [Click for original nearmap]
Milton (Lang Park) (before flooding)
Milton (Lang Park) (after flooding)

In the original representation this obviously has the wow effect for discovering whats underneath and then covering it up again. This is great interactive visualisation. The fasciantion lies in the hidden part.

HMAS Diamantina in ‘dry dock’ at South Bank [Click for original nearmap]

Two men in a floating ‘spa’ in Chelmer [Click for original nearmap]
Milton (Lang Park) (before flooding)
Milton (Lang Park) (after flooding)

Via infosthetics

Chromaroma – Public Transport Gaming

By: admin_urbantick

25-01-2011

Uncategorised

What could brighten up the daily gray commutes back and forth between nowhere and somewhere? Well I guess a game coud actually, but card games are not a big hit during rush hours and playing on the iphone or DS is about as lonely as it gets. Lets play the system.

Chromorama is a multiplayer platform that does exactly this. It animates your bleak journey as a move in the game. The whole tube network i the borad and any tap in, tap out recorded with the oyster card is a move in the game.

After a test phase last year they launched a public beta version that is now open for signing up. So far the network for players was focused on the tube network. However this has been extended to include the London Bike Scheme. When ever you check in and out your bike this now also counts as game moves.

Image taken from chromorama blog / The final view is an overall global view which give the player an overivew of all the team activity. I particularly like this one becuase it has a corporeal quality and the odd look of it. Like blood pumping around the heart of the city. The players powering a metropolis, a beast coming to life, like Frank emerging from the floorboards in “Hellraiser”.

Just recently the whole visual have been reworked and it looks juicy now. ALso the mission and activities the players can participate on have been extended it looks like a lot of fun. There is for example the ‘Ghost Hunter’ mission. Currently set to “Visit Becontree between 11:00 PM and 01:00 AM within 5 days Becontree is rumoured to be haunted by a faceless woman with long blonde hair, spotted on numerous occasions by the staff there. Go there late at night, and hope you don’t see her…”

Image by wearemudlark / Screen grab of October player view3.

In a sense the whole of the public transport network could become a playground and each yellow tap in point a gaming button. Commuting is about to become fun and tfl wil now make your day rather than ruin it. With this move to incorporate a fun aspect, the perception of routines is transformed and a different kind of motivation can swing the direction.

This is to some extend the vision of ‘You Are the City’ put into practice. The ‘user’ becomes a ‘player’ in the sense of an actor. This change of role definition probably makes the whole difference. Of course aspects of size and relationship help with this one.

You got the taste? Sign up HERE.

Sustainability and the Social Context of Ecological Urbanism

By: admin_urbantick

07-05-2010

Uncategorised

Ecology is one of the most popular words nowadays. We all throw terms in frequently like sustainable, environment friendly, renewable, efficiency, green, climate change. It is now important for Companies, governments, politicians, individuals; to turn green. Some really respect the cause and care about themselves and the planet. While others take advantage of the situation; “green” is now a profitable brand. For good or for bad ecology is know trendy.

Image taken from CNN / In Copenhagen, Denmark, which has a reputation for accommodating cyclists, Jessica Eisenbraun gets her exercise riding around the city on her steel bike, which is older than she is but easy to maintain. Biking is the fastest way around the city, she says, when you consider how long it would take to park a car or take a bus.

“GREED Vs GREEN” Our contemporary societies are evolving from “greedy to greeny”. Bill Maher, an american comedian and critic said in his show; “greed isn’t good! In fact, is the common threat that runs through all of the problems that this country faces, from financial meltdown, to healthcare, to climate change. Americans will do anything to each other for money…” Twenty years ago greed and consumption were the key factors in any society. Things seem to be changing slowly. Unfortunately we needed get scared the hell out to evolve! We all now fear; Climate change, terrorism and the economy. As a result society is getting a conscious.

Individual consciousness seems to be the answer for this mess. Consciousness about our ways of life by consuming less and taking care of our selves and the environment. Italian Architect Andrea Branzi in his “Weak Metropolis Lecture” at the ecolological urbanism conference in Harvard talked about our attempt to change cities with major architecture projects, and how we must instead focus on smaller scale projects that will be able to penetrate households and cultures. It is in the conscious of the individual that ecological urbanism finds its roots.

Sustainability is the capacity to endure independently. The term is often used in architecture and urbanism for projects that respect or use a minimum of natural resources, the same term can be applied on individuals. The sustainability of the individual must be approached on how the individual takes advantage of the environment with the minimum impact over it. Environment relating to the geographical location, social and cultural surroundings of the habitant. This means that Andrea Branzi arguments are very strong. Even though a large amount of resources could be used in the construction process I do believe that well thought macro projects can bring benefits to a city and small projects like roof productive gardens (not only grass!) in each house hold can definitely create a huge difference on the sustainability of a city. Small viral green projects carried out at a house hold scale or at an individual scale will change the dynamic of the city. It will bring better quality of life to the habitants and it will lower the resources that the city requires.

Image taken from civileats.com / Roof of Abundance, a repot from the frontline of roofgardening in New York by Paula Crossfield. Details can be found in the ‘Roof Garden Rookies’ Category.

An informed individual is a conscious one. Nowadays we can find several web pages that will inform and measure the carbon footprint of individuals or small businesses. For example myfootprint.org, or one that I recently discover and that I really enjoyed is www.changinghabbits.org The ‘Changing Habbits’ project was initiated, designed and developed by Prof. David Walker and Prof. Rob Holdway of Giraffe Innovation. By responding to some easy questions this website will calculate your carbon footprint and will illustrate it in a fun way, at the end of the exercise you will have a perspective of your house hold habits and some simple tips on becoming greener and on improving your quality of life. The message is simple, wrong habits will make you a fat, ugly and unhappy person! So from a greedy materialistic frightened society we must change our ways into a conscious society. We all are ecological urbanists.

Image taken from changinghabbits.org / cover illustration.

This guest post by Luis Suarez forms part of the discussion on Ecological Urbanism as an urbanTick series .

—
Luis Suarez was born, in Bogotá, Colombia and graduated from The University of Florida in design, construction and planning in 2005. He received a master in science of urban design from The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is currently pursuing a Masters in Bioclimatic Architecture from The Isthmus School of Architecture for Latin America and the Caribbean. He is designing and building multiple projects in South and Central America with his established firm, Estudio ArQ.

AR in Your Shoe

By: admin_urbantick

29-04-2010

Uncategorised

Walking the city in your shoe is one thing, but walking the internet in your shoe is quite another. So far a few key strokes and mainly the one finger to scroll and click the mouse were the tools you used to navigate the internet. This is so 2000 and has completely changed now. Adidas shows how you can navigate with your sneakers!
They have launched anew edition, the AR GAME PACK SNEAKERS and it is integrated with a new platform Adidas Neighbourhood.
The whole thing is based on AR augmented reality technology and the software will read the tag printed on the tongue of the shoe.

Image taken from Adidas / Print file to manufacture your own tag for a game teaser. Pint and fold to use as a mokup in case you havent bought the shoe yet.

So of you go running trough the Adidas Neighbourhood and chatting up the girls on the street cornet, playing the streets in the hood and hang out with the buddies. Down the steps out the door, the city is all yours!
Dream on and if you like this idea don’t read any further. Well, actually it si not quite like this. You wil find yourself squat in ten centimeter of your screen in your half dark empty room trying to line up the tag with the webcam and SHOOT star ship troopers!
Oh my goodness how boring is that. Its just another one person shooter. Instead of the mouse, the joystick you wiggle your shoe – with your hands. I have to confess I never was a big fan of one person shooters. Played them occasionally, but haven’t for a long time. And the combination of shooting and sneakers is no really not the first one I construct, but here we are.
So much exiting stuff coud be done, at least some GTA style of interaction?
Never mind, this is great and I love it anyway. Someone will come up with a better scenarion. The combination of commercial goods and virtual content has so much potential for exciting application that this is definitely a great first move. The internet of things comes to your feet. This is definitely what we are going to see a lot in the coming month.
There was already quite a some stuff last year, with BMW’s augmented comercial for the new Z4 for example or the Tales of Things project, Lego Digital Box and Adidas.
Both LEGO and Adidas are actually based on the metaio platform: “As a pioneer in the area of augmented reality (AR) technology, metaio develops software products for visual interactive solutions seamlessly combining real and virtual elements. Based on the software platform Unifeye, 3D-animations can be integrated seamlessly into the real-user`s environment.” They have also developed the junaio software an AR platform for mobile devices with a developer API, very similar to layar.
So it is a war out there and a lot of companies are battling for a few users in a emerging field. In this sense first person shooter is not so much out of place.

Image taken from hypebeat / the guys out in the hood, this is street life and this wold be what we want to see. The geolocation game Urban Defender in this sense was a lot more inspiring, but the two seem very much related and one almost want to merge them. It just needs a bit more action than just shooting.

Gaming at Large Scale

By: admin_urbantick

26-10-2009

Uncategorised

Real world gaming with the help of mobile gadgets with GPS are high up this week. This weekends Saturday Guardian Guide points to a gaming event that will take place over the next weekend simultaneously in three locations across the UK.
It is once more a sign of the upcoming section of location-interactive-real-world-games. Those are together with the availability of gadgets popular and also develop into more mass compatible storyboards and technologies. In an other post on real-world games HERE, looked at reinterpreted old classics.
The announced event ‘greatstreetgames’ will take place between 29 October and the 1 November simultaneously in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. It is set up as a competition between the three places, but anyone can join any team, it is open to the public.
Basically it will consist of a large play field projected in each location where players collect points by collecting ‘virtual’ balls. It will be a best of five series each game lasting 90 seconds. The city with the most points wins. Surprisingly the official web pages do not make a very big deal out of it. THere is very little information to be found outside the world of techies and geeks.

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Image by KMA via Pruned

It is designed by KMA, collaboration between Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler. They introduce their work as follow “KMA’s work creates large, immersive, sometimes networked, ‘digital playgrounds’, in which distinctions between audiences and performers disappear. The resulting social engagements reaffirm the urban community through embodied, rather than verbal, discourse.”
The project has already featured on Pruned and was embedded in a lovely story envisioning the encounter with the projected game field as something one might stumble across in the darkness of the vast city, something that might be a discovery.
However this game is locally very confined to a rather small space as the visualisations suggest. You wont need the GPS to play, maybe to find it, if you were texted the latest location for today’s game. Nevertheless, it does connect over a large distance the three cities. From the available descriptions it is difficult to grasp how much interaction is possible between the locations, but this definitely would be the most interesting aspect. Maybe someone in Sunderland will snatch your virtual ball and drop it in their own box.
To some extend the game proposal reminds me of the ‘Where is Wally’ scene with the six team football.

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Image by KMA via Pruned

As it looks, Hollywood also has realized that there is something changing in the world of gamers and games. They have implemented the aspect of real people in a virtual game for quite a while, probably because it makes of simple plots. The latest version is the ‘Gamer’ movie directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. What they haven’t yet realised is the spatial aspect of the emergent street games and with it the importance of the location.
But probably this is the point, a game is not a movie, you are not entertained, you are entertaining as you play the game.

Interaction with the Urban Form – Plymouth City Centre

By: admin_urbantick

05-12-2008

Uncategorised

Plymouth city centre is a very specific area. It has a very distinct character arising from the strong postwar design by Patrick Abercrombie. It has a truly mono functional use, it is a shopping centre in the most literal sense of the word possible. There are no offices, no restaurants, no pubs or bars, no housing, just shops and on the first or second floors storage space for the shops.
The shops open at 10h00 am and close at 18h00. These hours then basically determine the “opening” of the city centre. Outside of those the centre is dead, again literally. There is a very special phenomenon attached to this. Although the opening hours are as described above, shoppers vanish around 17h00. So approximately one hour before closing the shops are already empty and so is the center. Being in HMV at half five is like a scene out of “I am Legend” – hello is there someone? (I have written a longer article about this topic on JLF urban research.)
To my surprise this pattern shows up dramatically in my records. Although I was aware of this pattern and could have behaved differently, but I didn’t. There is no reason to walk through this area, as there is nothing happening and on top of this it becomes rather scary to be on your own in this vast outdoor shopping centre at night.
This short clip shows the activities within 24h. It is zoomed right into Plymouth center. The activities start around 10h00 and end exactly at 17h00. There is the odd crossing outside of these hours, but the characteristic shows clearly.

plymouth365_plyCentre from urbanTick on Vimeo.

To illustrate this in a bit more context, the following images include the city centre of Plymouth but cover also bits of outside area. What this shows is, that even after 17h00 the track record shows still a high number of activities, but they all exclude magically the centre.

Images by urbanTick – Time sequence 07h00, 09h00, 11h00, 16h00, 17h00, 19h00 and 22h00 activity in the Plymouth city center. Click for larger view.

Comparison

By: admin_urbantick

04-12-2008

Uncategorised

What is now possible is to compare three different cities. I have a track record from Plymouth, Basle and London.
The following three screenshots are taken from Google Earth at an altitude of 9km. So they are comparable in scale.
What they all have in common is the fix points. The main structural elements of how my days work in terms of space and time are the same. Leaving home going to the same workplace everyday and returning back home. Between those fix points there build up quite intense tracks lines. This base layer get extended by some secondary points, e.g. location for the weekly shopping, favorite spots, friends location, … The third element are the trips. Journeys that are usually going out of the daily routine to a further destination or just a stroll. They occur characteristically on days off or weekends. Depending on how familiar I am with the surrounding they are more focused or of more explorative nature.

Image by urbanTick – Plymouth

Image by urbanTick – Basel

Image by urbanTick – London

Interesting is to compare how I respond to the urban surrounding. The three cities have very distinct urban patterns from one another. Take Plymouth, a city completely planned almost from scratch after it was destroyed in the Second World War. The planner was Patrick Abercrombie who also presented ideas for the reconstruction or better new construction of London after the Blitz. Basel on the other hand is a similar size city in a very different setting with its growth patterns structuring very much its appearance. Or London as the third example, the world city with its single centre core.
To explore how those characteristics influence my interaction with the built environment in terms of routs I choose I overlay my tracks onto maps that capture the characteristics of the three cities.

Image by urbanTick – Plymouth Abercrombie Plan with Plymouth 365 track overlay

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, the tracks redraw quite exactly the characteristics of the Abercrombie Plan.

Image by urbanTick – Basel city center with track overlay

Note area A (dark brown) is the old medieval town surrounded by walls dated ca 1860. Area B (beige) is the extension, ca 1875,but still surrounded by a wall. Area C is the extension of the city ca 1926, but is also mainly the present extend. It is important to know that after the walls have been demolished, the freed up space has been used for major infrastructure placements such as roads, but also as open spaces. This means that additionally to the link roads that from the centre outwards there is also a no of ring roads (on the ground of the former walls) that tie in very well with the rest of the network. Moving radial is quite simply in therefore and the use of it is represented in through the no of tracks. Compared to this in London it’s quite tricky to travel radial as it has a strong centralized structure, roads mainly leading into or out of the city centre.
This then is represented in the London track log. It is strongly linear and this represents exactly this centrality as the line is pointing towards the centre.
So now guess which track log is which city.

Images by urbanTick – track record line drawings

— urbantick

Floods – Changes Over Time

Chromaroma – Public Transport Gaming

AR in Your Shoe

Gaming at Large Scale

Interaction with the Urban Form – Plymouth City Centre

Comparison

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