Urban Digital Media

Link

PILEUS: Internet Umbrella by Takashi Matsumoto

Pileus is an interactive medium of an umbrella to make city-exploring fun. Pileus has a big screen on its inside surface, and a camera and embedded sensors on its grip. Then it provides natural embodied interaction with web services to make city walking more interactive.

The current prototype has two main functions: photo-sharing and 3D map navigation. The photo-sharing function is connected to Flickr, then a user can share their finding (e.g. new shops, beautiful scenes) in a city with his/her friends taking a picture by the camera. The screen also shows beautiful photo-streams retrieved from shared-pictures in a Flickr community. The photo-function is operated by a simple action on the umbrella with a motion sensor without any complicated operations. 

Fig: Flickr photo stream on Pileus

The user also can switch the service to a map. Pileus automatically detects user's location and shows bird-eyes view of a map around to give a sense of the place in mixed reality. The map is automatically updated by user's position by GPS and a digital compass. 

Fig: 3D map on Pileus

Project link

City Tag-location-based multiplayer game for spontaneous social interaction

iPaq screens showing 3 different game states

CitiTag is a wireless location-based multiplayer game, designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences in city environments by integrating virtual presence with physical. In the first version of CitiTag you roam the city with a GPS- and WiFi-enabled iPaq PocketPC in search for players of the opposite team that you can ‘tag’. You can also get tagged yourself if one of them gets close to you. Then you need to find a friend to free you. Urban space becomes a playground and everyone is a suspect.

Where: The Open University Campus in Milton Keynes and Bristol Centre (St. Augustine’s Parade

Why:The CitiTag game is being developed to explore social experiences and emergent behaviours in public spaces through playful interaction, based on the awareness of other players’ presence. The project is motivated by the hypothesis that very simple game rules based on presence states (e.g. I am Green and ‘tagged’) can result in an enjoyable social experience, stimulated by real world interaction among players. The aim of our studies is to identify the design implications for future technology mediated social experiences and how such experiments can inform the experience design process.

The project involves the collaboration between HP Labs and the Open University’sKnowledge Media Institute (KMi). KMi’s Centre for New Media is developing the client software and multi-user server. The user trials will provide data for Yanna Vogiazou’s (OU) and Bas Raijmaker’s (RCA) PhD work.

Open Source Architecture for Africa

Osafa.org has just launched and will be a Wikipedia-like platform where the "source code" of construction projects, i.e.

• floor plans,
• building descriptions,
• drafts/photos and
• commercials calculations

are being shared under an open licence, ready to be reused or adapted, without licence fees.

We want to apply the success factors of Open Source Software to the intellectual wisdom of African architecture. Osafa is to be used by all stakeholders of construction projects in Africa, professionals and hobbyists, Africans and non-Africans, world changers and business people alike.

Website

SmartGridCity becomes first fully functioning smart city in the world

Reduces and automatically detects power outages in Boulder; Customers will soon be able to see their energy usage online

DENVER – Xcel Energy’s SmartGridCity™ project in Boulder, Colo., has completed construction of the infrastructure and launched the remaining software to enable all SmartGridCity operational functions. This step makes it the first fully functioning smart grid enabled city in the world that increases reliability, provides customers with greater energy use information, and allows participating customers and Xcel Energy to control in-home energy management devices remotely when demand calls for it.

“As measurable results continue to be achieved in the coming months, we look forward to continued improvements in operating efficiencies, as well as new and improved services for the citizens of Boulder, Colorado,” said Tim Taylor, president and CEO, Public Service Co. of Colorado, an Xcel Energy company. “We have learned a tremendous amount from our installation of SmartGridCity and anticipate additional benefits for us and all of our customers.”

This launch ties together all the automated functions of SmartGridCity including: switching power through fully-automated substations; re-routing power around bottlenecked lines; detecting power outages and proactively identifying outage risks. The deployment integrated more than 20 applications, 95 new interfaces and more than 300 test cases.

The latest software is proving some smart grid theories about reducing power outages on the company’s distribution system and adding real-time monitoring capabilities of the electric grid status. Early results indicate that smart grid technology is allowing the company to predict equipment failure and proactively make necessary repairs before an outage occurs.

The SmartGridCity project also included automating three of four distribution substations, four computer-monitored power feeders, and another 23 feeders that are watched for voltage irregularities. Approximately 200 miles of fiber optic cable, 4,600 residential and small business transformers and nearly 16,000 smart meters are now connected to the smart grid system.

News Link

Smart Grid City Website

NY Talk Exchange

on exibition at 
MoMA The Museum of Modern Art
Design and Elastic Mind
February 24th - May 12th 2008 New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?

Trash Track- MIT Senseable City Lab

We know a lot about supplying chain, but little about removal chain

Imagine a future where immense amounts of trash didn’t pile up on the peripheries of our cities: a future where we understand the ‘removal-chain’ as we do the ‘supply-chain’, and where we can use this knowledge to not only build more efficient and sustainable infrastructures but to promote behavioral change. In this future city, the invisible infrastructures of trash removal will become visible and the final journey of our trash will no longer be “out of sight, out of mind”.

Elaborated by the SENSEable City Lab and inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, TrashTrack focuses on how pervasive technologies can expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Can these same pervasive technologies make 100% recycling a reality?

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

The project is an initial investigation into understanding the 'removal-chain' in urban areas and it represents a type of change that is taking place in cities: a bottom-up approach to managing resources and promoting behavioral change through pervasive technologies. TrashTrack builds on previous work of the SENSEable City Lab in its exploration of how the increasing deployment of sensors and mobile technologies radically transforms how we understand and describe cities.

Link

IP CITY- Public Pervasive Computing: Making the Invisible Visible

ABSTRACT

The increasing deployment of pervasive computing technologies in urban environments has inspired researchers to explore the intersections between physical, social, and digital domains. The multidisciplinary Just-for-Us project is developing a mobile Web service designed to facilitate new forms of interaction by adapting content to the user's physical and social context.

Computer (09/06) Vol. 39, No. 9, P. 60; Kjeldskov, Jesper; Paay, Jeni

Human computer interaction (HCI) researchers, sociologists, and city architects, planners, and designers are investigating the employment of pervasive computing technologies in urban environments; one area of exploration is the Just-for-Us project, a multidisciplinary effort to develop a publicly available mobile Web service that can enable new kinds of interaction by adapting content to the physical and social context of the user. Designing public-use computer systems requires system developers and HCI designers to gain a basic understanding of a physical space and its effects on the social interactions that occur there. Just-for-Us uses a pervasive sensor network to produce a digital layer of information about people, sites, and activities to facilitate physical- and social-context adaptability. Content is dynamically delivered to the user via database queries. The Just-for-Us system architecture includes context-dependent HTML pages, maps and graphics presented on a mobile Web browser, PHP scripts and server-side applications, and MySQL database, while Bluetooth beacons and other Bluetooth-enabled devices feed into the client application. The Just-for-Us interface features a home screen that displays a panorama of a public site as well as annotations about landmarks within the user's current physical whereabouts and a meter indicating the current level of social activity. The user can raise a Now screen that shows the level and nature of social activity transpiring within the user's proximity. The Just-for-Us researchers are attempting to update their design concept to accommodate more user content contributions, facilitate socializing between users based on 「virtual proximity,」 and broaden the system's area of coverage, among other things.

Reference link

Gypsii.com-on-line social networking site

What Is GyPSii? GyPSii is a way to share the places in your life with the people in your life. With GyPSii you can:

• Upload and share your Places worldwide
• Find your friends and meet new people
• Browse hundreds of thousands of interesting Places uploaded by community members
• Customize your experience with favorites and your own Personal Profile
• Integrate GyPSii into other web services using simple embeds.

Link

great data visualization project using PV3D

http://synoptic.weaintplastic.com/

A nice tourist information visualization

The last week of our Interactive Data Visualization course was spent working on a final project using Adobe Flash and a UN Data Set of our choice. Working together with Mimi Son, we chose a data set from the UN's World Tourism Organization and created a visualization that examines the region of origin of tourists in the world's 10 most visited countries for 2005.

http://www.localhiddenvariable.com/ciid/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tourism.html

Google Earth with Flex (IE + Firefox on Windows only)

You can type in a location, and it will go there. You can also toggle the nav controls, and the grid overlay. This example requires the Google Earth plugin, and only works in browsers that are supported by Google Earth (IE + Firefox on Windows only).

example website
Sourecode

Natural Fuse

Natural Fuse harnesses the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants to create a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants that act both as energy providers and as shared "carbon sink" circuit breakers. By sharing resources and information between the plants energy expenditure can be collectively monitored and managed.

reference link

Several Nice Processing projects

The Blob Interface

Student charts electrical usage in real-time, much to Big Brother's delight

It's our best guess that University of Florida PhD student Jason Winters woke up at 10:00AM ET this morning and took an approximately 18-minute shower. How did we come to this conclusion? Using an AC clamp attached to an ioBridge, the biomedical engineering scholar measures the main electrical lines entering his house and sends the data to a Google charts widget on his personal blog that reports the kilowatt-hour usage in real time. As a footnote, he presents an example graph of when the hot water is turned on, which then produces close to 4500 watts. That's just over the amount of power he used this morning for about 1100 seconds. Of course, we can't say for certain any of these morning events really transpired, but then again, we don't exactly want to know. Hit up the read links for directions on DIYing this.

To read more

Wikitude for Google's Android phones

WIKITUDE - AR TRAVEL GUIDE

"TELLS YOU WHAT YOU SEE!"

Wikitude is a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content. It is a handy application for planning a trip or to find out about landmarks in your surroundings; 350,000 world-wide points of interest may be searched by GPS or by address and displayed in a list view, map view or cam view.

Personal Bike Lanes

We need bikelanes all around America. (My friend Mark says we have a perfect bike lane system, we just need to get the cars off of it.) The roads aren't engineered to provide space for the bike lane, and when bike lanes are depicted they often put riders into the "door zone" which has problems of its own.

This designer's solution is a laser device mounted on the rear rack of a bike, projecting a personal bike lane on the road surface to call the driver's attention to the rider. I would buy one of these right now.

Swiss Research Group Develops Public Energy Awareness Display Around Plogg

Grimsby, United Kingdom, February 20, 2009 --(PR.com)-- A research team at the Bits-to-Energy Lab of ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) has designed and installed a public energy use demonstrator and online monitoring system based on Plogg wireless smart meter technology, developed by UK-based Energy Optimizers. Known as ‘Energie Visible’ (Visible Energy), the new system was commissioned by Cudrefin02, a sustainable development foundation based in Cudrefin, Switzerland.

Energie Visible monitors energy consumption of individual electrical appliances at Cudrefin02’s headquarters by Lake Neuchâtel, displaying data graphically on a large screen at the front of the building for the benefit of passers-by. Besides its public awareness function, the browser-based system gives staff easy access to energy consumption data either over the local network or the internet, helping them to make better informed decisions on efficient use of electrical appliances.

Each appliance to be monitored is connected to a Plogg Blu smart meter, a simple plug-in device that uses Bluetooth to communicate current and logged historical power consumption. As ETH researcher Dominique Guinard explains: “We were looking for a device suitable for appliance level monitoring. Although there are many companies working on smart metering at the moment, Energy Optimizers was the only one with a working off-the-shelf product that does exactly what we need.”

Using a C-based Plogg API (application programming interface) supplied by Energy Optimizers, the ETH team extended the functionality of Plogg to provide continuous measurement in near real time, and constructed a C++ Plogg gateway for automatic device discovery, management and data acquisition. The gateway delivers data in JSON (JavaScript object notation) format to an embedded open-source web server, using a low-bandwidth form of web service delivery known as REST (representational state transfer).

For information display, ETH used the Google Web Toolkit to develop a Java graphical interface. While the public information display at Cudrefin has room for just six graphs — one for each of four monitored appliance sets (refrigerator, kettle, computer/screen, and printer/file server) and the other two showing total consumption (kWh) and a comparison of the appliances — the system allows scaling to and navigation between a larger number of Ploggs. Cudrefin02 plans to make the information display available on its website.

Energy Optimizers general manager, Shaun Merrick, commented: “We are always keen to support projects that see Plogg not just as a product, but as an enabling technology for future smart energy systems. We are particularly pleased to be part of the Energie Visible project because it encourages people — both in-house staff and the general public — to conceive and implement their own energy efficiency measures.”

Following installation at Cudrefin02, the ETH team will shortly make Energie Visible publicly available as a free download from www.webofthings.com/tag/energyvisible. Planned future enhancements include remote on/off control of individual appliances via a web browser, and an iPhone interface. ETH is also evaluating a Zigbee enabled version of Plogg.

Reference

2008_Urban Battery permalink

The strip mall is already perfect and abject. Redecorating a strip mall makes no sense; all they need is some maintenance perhaps a fresh coat of paint. Reconfiguring a strip mall with an attempt to bring some life back into it, to make a glorious architectural spectacle, or somehow produce a small urban fragment, a reproduction of a lively part of New York's West village that's been radically cropped and condensed is flawed.

They are about an economic efficiency, doing the least, stripped-down. The most pragmatic solution from a developer's point of view would be to renovate the existing facades, making a Wild West storefront, but as an 「ideas」 competition, we decided to explore radical alternatives and potential futures where the strip mall calibrates the local environment as a giant filter, exposes its backside to the surrounding neighborhoods essentially opening what has been typically enclosed, and creating a program that reflects environmental and societal concerns.

Strip malls are a symptom of a greater problem, where private development has trumped the public good, providing the minimum amenities without defining a collective identity of urban space. The public square of the strip mall is a hot asphalt parking lot, which is both the center of attention for the surrounding strip buildings and its leftover, unconsidered space. If anything what is universally common and economically necessary amongst all strip malls is the parking lot.

The strip mall type is made up of discontinuous volumes. Here, we decided to unify the disparate strips through the site's most contested component the parking lot. This is our site of interest and where we thought the design could perform, integrated into urban infrastructures. Our proposal URBAN BATTERY is an attempt to reframe and recycle the leftover parking and motivate it towards a utopian desire at a very local scale, a micro-utopia. To counteract the effects of obesity, pollution, and urban sprawl we propose a prototype with a minimal footprint and maximum surface to offset the negative effects of the strip(s).

The Scottsdale competition site lacks any healthy urban infrastructures, no community centers, no pools, no green space, it's a dead quadrant. URBAN BATTERY reinvigorates it.

In terms of zoning, Urban Battery is a physical structure similar to a power station, vertical greenhouse, and a billboard, all rolled into one. It doesn't fit into the zoning chart. We believe that Scottsdale zoning is open enough to accommodate the programmatic innovation, even though this proposal is beyond the original intention of the competition. Urban Battery acts as an energy producer, filtering air, housing oxygen regenerating plants, providing bike paths, public gardens within the structure, and stores bioproducts. It also includes an additional building for community events that is attached at the base of the structure. This additional program could be for either teens or seniors dedicated to expanding activities from the neighborhood and accessible through a new bike and walking path, converting the alley into part of an urban infrastructure. "

-From the FlipaStrip Competition Boards, we were invited to the competition and awarded the first prize.

To read more

Shift Focus

A human-centered strategy for connecting energy efficiency to people

IDEO project

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is the Cabinet-level agency in the United States government responsible for energy policy and nuclear safety. The DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) works to strengthen the country's energy security, environmental quality, and economic vitality through public-private partnerships.

Over the last three decades, public awareness about the need for increased energy efficiency within the home has been on the rise. People are regularly bombarded with media messages about the need to conserve. Additionally, economic, social, and political forces are well aligned to induce energy-efficient behaviors and actions. Still, most residential energy customers have yet to adopt power-saving technologies and habits. For the DOE-EERE, a question emerged: Why aren't people doing more to conserve energy? The DOE-EERE engaged IDEO to develop strategies for tackling this question by making energy efficiency more attractive to US residential customers.

IDEO conducted an intensive insight-gathering program, surveying experts in energy efficiency, assessing the relationships and networks of the DOE-EERE, and seeking inspiration from analogous human experiences. The resulting insights were surprising and often counterintuitive, as people have diverse reasons for conserving energy. Certainly rising energy costs encourage people to change their behavior; however, economics alone are inadequate for shifting people's behavior on a mass scale. While concern for the environment or threat from global warming motivates some people, it is irrelevant, even a turn-off, for others. To tackle the scope of the challenge, the team recognized the need to catalyze broadly the design of human-centered product and service experiences. The team also worked to map the needs and behaviors of energy consumers at a deeper, more emotionally resonant level.

The strategy directed the DOE-EERE around the possibilities of human-centered design and innovation. The team shifted the focus from a highly technical- and scientific-driven culture to one that creates solutions which fit and enhance the way people live.

The result is a new point of view on energy efficiency for the DOE-EERE, anchored in people's needs. IDEO created an Opportunity Map and Guidelines that allow the DOE-EERE and their partners to design and guide experiences that better suit the lives of people in the home. IDEO designed Engagement Catalysts, comprised of a limited-edition 「Shift Focus」 book, 「Concept Flashcards,」 a 60-second tone-setting video short, and a modular presentation to support conversations between the DOE-EERE and their partners, intermediaries, sponsors, and thought leaders who, in turn, will ultimately bring about new energy-efficient experiences.

IDEO and the DOE-EERE are developing a series of workshops and presentations intended to broadly communicate the strategy, as well as design new methods for engaging intermediaries and DOE partners.

IDEO's work for the US Department of Energy – Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (DOE–EERE) was completed under a cooperative agreement, award number DE-FC36-08GO18101 / A000.