| track PLAN:MRL workshop |
A group project
developed during the PLAN technology workshop at the Mixed-Reality
Lab, University of Nottingham, UK (September 2005).
== CONCEPT ==
Track aims at enabling people to get in the shoes of
strangers when crossing their paths and to experience trails of their
lives: people leaving a personal trail along a path
(e.g. the music they are listening to, their heartbeat, etc), as well
as discovering
and following the trails of others around them. == TECHNOLOGY ==
Technology used
in the Track project would include a
GPS-enabled mobile device connected to content
generator(s) (e.g. microphone,
MP3 player, biometric sensor...) and corresponding playback actuators
(e.g. headphones, haptic actuators...).== DESIGN PROCESS ==
The project's concept originated from Malcolm Hall's idea
of crossing the paths taken by other people during a
day, and accessing blogs or urls connected to these paths. It evolved
into the current concept during brainstorming sessions.We prototyped the concept in three different ways, with:
- video scenarios exemplifying possible ways in which the device could work or could be used
- a PDA prototype proving the technical feasibility of the concept and making a first step in the implementation of the system
- experience prototypeing that show how it feels to walk in an out of a trail, using Wizard of Oz technique.
== USER SCENARIO ==
| * A user walks
around
the city with the device, on her way to work or
to meet friends. As the user is walking, the device records her path
and connects to it something that the user is experiencing and/or wants
to map to the path, e.g. music
she is listening to, her heartbeat, the sound of her breath... * The user approaches trails left behind by other people. These trails are displayed visually on the user's mobile device's screen together with the user's path. She can select one of them on the basis of proximity of time or at specific moments in time. * If following someone's trail, the user can hear/feel the other person's experience left along the path, for example continously hear what that person was listening to along the path or feeling that person's heartbeat (haptic actuator). If the user looses the trail, the content fades away. Depending on how old the content is, its quality has more or less high-fidelity. * The user could experience the content as the other one did or might have to walk at the same pace in order to synchronise with (otherwise the content could e.g. be played-back in slow-motion). In this second option, the playback would be more or less fast, hang up at particular point or go backwards when the user would speed up, slow down, stop or walk backwards on the path, respectively. * The user is also able to access people's trails and corresponding content later on, on the web, and see which trails cross hers at different points and periods in time. (At no moment does the identity of the users have to be disclosed.) |
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|
== VIDEOS
==
The following videos exemplify possible ways in
which the device could
work or could be used (storyboard)Please note that the dynamic and scale of the interactions is largely exagerrated for illustration purposes. In real life, paths would be less precise and changes slower and less dynamic. |
||
 Leaving a trail + re-experiencing it (following and loosing) |
 Leaving a trail + chasing it (matching speed) |
 Crossing multiple trails |
 Selecting a trail |
 Open platform for various content: e.g. experiencing heart-beat with haptics |
|
Screen shots from
the PDA screen showing a person's location with a red dot and various
trails as colour lines
== EXPERIENCE
PROTOTYPE ==
Prototyping the
experience of following a trail
consisted of making people walking with wireless
heaphones along a path taped on the ground in the lab.
As a person was walking, we processed the sounds he would be hearing to
simulate how the system would react (Wizard of Oz technique). Loosing a
trail would result in the sound fading out, walking faster in the music
going faster, walking backwards in the music being played backwards,
etc. |
 |
|
Iain and Kalle simulating changes along a path |
Christian experiencing the following of a trail |
== RELATED WORK ==
This project is related to the Familiar
Stangers project (Goodman, Paulos - Intel
Research Berkeley) in terms of enabling new means of
experiencing the presence of others in shared public space. It also
relates to several sound-walk and audio
space annotation projects. However, instead of using authored content
(such as guided tours or historical audio narratives) or leaving
punctual audio annotations, Track focuses on letting people
re-experience everyday people's trails of experience where they occured
and linearly along a path, on letting them 'walk in their shoes'.
Furthermore, Track is meant as a platform opened to various formats of
content: music but also audio narratives, video, biometrics such as
heart-beat re-experienced with haptics, etc.Various projects creating intimate connections among people with technology are listed on the mobile art and locative media resource website, under intimate connections:
http://www.netzwissenschaft.de/mob.htm#intimate
Below is a list of related locative audio and sound-walk projects:
| Location 33 (Will Carter,
USC) Album distributed over time and space. listen to it by walking around dowtown LA, picking fragments at different locations. When all fragments put together, they form a song. GPS enabled PDA + sound portals scattered around the area. http://www.location33.net/ http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/mobile/20050811-location_3.php 34N118W (Knowlton, Spellman, Hight) In-place audio narratives about history of area of LA, accessed through GPS enabled Tablet PC and headphones, as you walk around area. http://34n118w.net/34N/ Walks (Janet Cardiff) Visitors listen to CD walkman and follows directions through site. http://www.ps1.org/cut/press/cardiff.html Hear&There (Rozier, Karahalios, Donath - MIT Medialab) Augmented reality for locative audio http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/HearAndThere/ Tactical Sound Garden "Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), participants "plant" sounds within a positional audio environment. These plantings are mapped onto the coordinates of a physical location by a 3D audio engine. Wearing headphones connected to a WiFi enabled device, participants drift though virtual sound gardens planted by others as they move throughout the city." http://www.andinc.org/tsg/ Sound seeing tours Audio sight-seeing tours as podcasts (authored by anyone) http://soundseeingtours.com Melodious Walkabout (Etter) Mobile auditory navigation system http://richardetter.net/thesis.php |
Placing Voices (Brian
House, knifeandfork.org) Mobile-sound-blog software for placing fragments of strangers's voices on a web-accessible map of NYC as they occur. http://brianhouse.net/?project=placing Riot! (Mobile Bristol) Interactive play for voices based in historical square. walking around the square triggers sounds and voices. backpack + heaphones http://www.mobilebristol.com/QueenSq.html Trace, Drift, Itinerant (Teri Rueb) Site-specific sound-walks using GPS http://www.terirueb.net/trace/index.html http://www.terirueb.net/drift/index.html http://turbulence.org/Works/itinerant/index.htm Guided by Voices (Lyons, Gandy, Starner - Georgia Tech) http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ccg/publications/icad2000-voices/ Electric Walks (Kubisch) http://www.christinakubisch.de/english/installationen_frs.htm Mobile music sharing: SoundPryer (Östergren, Juhlin, Interactive Institute) Eaves-dropping in what drivers listen to in traffic http://www.tii.se/mobility/soundpryerpresentation.htm tunA (Bassoli, Moore, Agamanolis, MLE) Sharing playlists in ad hoc networks http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefan/hc/projects/tuna/ Suica music sharing (Mori, Suzuki, Shimizu, IDD@Tamabi) Getting music from person before you when crossing JR metro entrance with Suica card http://www.viktoria.se/~lalya/tamabi05/design_exercises/index.html |
== PROJECT
TEAM ==
 |
Marek Bell - Equator Glasgow, UK Adam Drozd - Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, UK Lalya Gaye - Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden Malcolm Hall - Equator Glasgow, UK Iain Mott - Artist, Australia Karl-Petter Åkesson - SICS, Sweden |
| Group
presentation of the project at the end of the PLAN:MRL workshop in
Nottingham, UK |
Link: workshop wiki + project wiki
== PLAN:MRL ==
PLAN (Pervasive
and Locative Arts Network) is a new international and interdisciplinary
research
network in pervasive media and locative media, funded as part of the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Culture
& Creativity programme in the UK. The network brings together
practicing artists, technology developers and ethnographers with the
aim of advancing interdisciplinary understanding and building consortia
for future collaborative projects. The PLAN technology workshop at MRL was an opportunity for a small technically-capable group to learn from each other and explore, build,and define the realities of future research directions in the emerging fields of pervasive and locative media. The group included expertise and access to a whole range of platforms and technologies in this area, including sensors and actuators, present and next generation cellphone networks and handsets, web 2.0 methods and standards, interaction and
industrial design, mathematical modelling and simulation, mapping and location sensing.
The workshop took place at the Mixed Reality Lab (MRL) at the University of Nottingham, an interdisciplinary research lab focused on the development and application of mixed reality to visualisation, learning, knowledge management, control systems, ethnomethodological studies, leisure and co-operative work.