imran*

Category: Locative

  • Our City, Our Music

    Ourcityourmusic
    Something interesting’s afoot in Leeds, as a group of the city’s digital artists prepare to record its first geo-located album, Our City, Our Music.

    We’re all accustomed to certain ‘geo-retarded’ music only being available digitally in the US, but what Ben Dalton, Megan Smith and Ben Halsall are proposing is to shoot a couple dozen videos around the streets of the city – using HP’s Mscape – capturing the contributions of local performers, artists, residents and filmmakers in a collective production.

    Mscape’s an interesting choice, retrofitting GPS-enabled devices to encode audio and video with locative data at the point of recording. Indeed, Our City, Our Music is the winning project a contest organised by Just-b, HP Labs and the Arts Council.

    Throughout the coming year, the group will be shooting twelve live videos (one a month?) with the hope that local filmmakers and bands will volunteer to contribute to each segment of the project, providing a kinda locative, musical narrative to the city…and I think other cities if the project is a success.

    Uploading your music video to YouTube is a cost-effective way to promote your video. It doesn’t require a huge budget, unlike other promotional methods such as TV commercials or billboards. If you want your video to have a bigger impact, you can try https://themarketingheaven.com/buy-youtube-views/ to buy youtube views and in that way you can reach a large audience and potentially generate more revenue.

    Volunteers have until 4th January to apply…head on over to www.ourcityourmusic.com for more…

  • Mixed Reality & Exploring Deep Place

    EnkinphoneIn recent weeks I’ve been thinking that a confluence of innovations could begin to usher in an era of mixed reality and augmented reality applications…

    • Together, Google’s APIs for mobile maps and mobile search provide a ubiquitous substrate for locative media.
    • Phones & cell networks  are now capable of multiple methods of locating themselves – GPS, cell-ID and even SMS commands.

    Though producers of actual reality games, such as area/code, gestural handset manufacturers like GeoVector and researchers such as Markus Kähäri have been exploring mixed reality platforms for many years, I believe the Android platform and the upcoming iPhone SDK are where we’ll see some action in the next few months.

    Rafael Spring and Max Braun have already taken up the Google Android developer challenge with Enkin (thanks Aaron), a ‘link between maps and reality’ that uses positioning data from GPS, accelerometers for orientation and gestures along with a number of web services to overlay data onto a 3D maps or live camera feeds. In essence, Enkin can alternately provide a God’s Eye View of your immediate environment or a ‘head-up display‘  for whatever you happen to be looking at.

    Though Enkin is ergonomically clunky, it points the way towards for multimodal mixed reality; there’s no hardware used in Spring & Braun’s work that’s not in current and future handsets.

    A couple years ago, I was mesmerised by the possibilities of my friend Victor’s Herescan project at IDII – he playfully describes it as Exploring Deep Place. It looks like Mixed Reality is about to join the fabric of Actual Reality 🙂

    UPDATE: One step closer with Evolution Robotics’ ViPR visual search technology for the iPhone…check out the video demonstration on YouTube.

  • Leeds Open Street Mapping Party

    Leedsopenstreetmap
    Tim Waters has finalised plans for Leeds’ first Open Street Mapping party on 15+16th September…

    Tim’ll walk everyone through how things work and has a few GPS units as loaners for people without the necessary gear. Tim’s arranged a private room at the Starbucks on Albion Street, for some coffee, a chat and some planning on how to divide the city up.

    Tim also tells me he might be getting Nell McAndrew and Chris Moyles to stop by!

    It sounds like a lotta fun, a chance to learn about locative media and also contribute to an important project. Do let him know if you’re coming at the Upcoming listings page.

    —

    Whizzgoleeds
    A few days ago, Tim and I got talking about approaching local car-on-demand company WhizzGo as a potential partner for…

    • using their vehicles as ‘sensors’ for the OSM project
    • creating anonymised journey data for their fleet, perhaps surfacing new locations and recommending best ‘real-world’ routes?
    • share mapping data they already have for the city.

    Leeds Met’s Linda Broughton and I have also been considering how WhizzGo could be deployed as part of a coworking subscription and as a transport utility between the university’s Civic Quarter and Headingley Campus.

    UPDATE: Unfortunately, after a brief discussion with WhizzGo’s investors, the Viking Fund, it seems WhizzGo’s not in control of their own technology and lack the fleet size to strike partnerships with anyone other than large companies that can increase their user base and vehicle utilisation…

  • Trippy – Nokia Sports Tracker & Google Earth

    TrippyAfter learning about the Nokia Sports Tracker almost a month ago, I finally managed to get it working. Apparently, there was a stray folder on my phone’s memory card which meant the application shut down each time I tried to record a GPS track.

    The software is clunky, but the integration with Google Earth is almost magical. On the way home from last Friday’s Ensembli board meeting, I flipped open the app and recorded my route home, including a detour to see my cousin Aisha. Curiously, at both ends of the trip, the GPS track goes crazy – I wonder if radio-bounces in an urban or indoor environment cause this?

    Brum
    Yesterday, returning from a friend’s wedding in Birmingham, I recorded a track along the M6, M62 and the North edge of the Peak District. Winding through a few Pennine valleys didn’t seem to cause any problems, but around two-and-a-half hours of continuous use resulted in a crash, losing the track north-west of Oldham.

    Google Earth pulls a few interesting facts outta the KML file, including the highest point at 472m in the Pennines, the lowest at 62m just outside Warrington and the fastest 88mph on the M6, west of Stafford (that’s definitely too low!).

    So what’s next? The Apple iTrack? Sometime in 2010, I’ll be loading my BMW CS Concept‘s integrated Apple iTrack with a drivemix of people’s favourite routes through the Lake District…setting it to autopilot and sitting back to enjoy the scenery 🙂

  • Divine Direction

    DandellaElegant. Gizmodo’s covering a GPS navigator that’s as simple as a stalk that bends towards your destination…pair ’em up and you can keep track of a friend 🙂

    Dandella is the winning concept from the Japan Design Foundation’s International Design Competition…woulda been cute to see the two winners finding each other with a pair of Dandellas. It’s a lovely example of tangible media and playful, emotional design…I love that it lives in a Charging Vase! Perhaps we’ll see cellphones that pull you towards your next meeting 😉

    The other finalists are largely robotic concepts – perhaps typical of Japanese research – that illustrate the fascinating edge concepts of modern industrial design in Japan.

  • The Man Who Fell To Google

    Foocamp_1As promised, at around noon on Saturday 26th August 2006, Google chartered a plane to overfly Foo Camp at O’Reilly’s Sebastopol campus and photograph the event for Maps and Earth. Here you can see a cute banner on the grass, the camp site, some people splayed out for the cameras and – most significantly – the lunch queue 🙂

    I’m gutted. I was having so much fun inside, that I forgot to go outside. If you’d like a closer look, download the KMZ location for Google Earth here…

    UPDATE: The full set of photos includes a Cylon Raider and some space invader images…more from Tom Coates 🙂

  • 28 Days

    The month of Shawwal has been a symmetry of life and death for our family, bracketed by the passing of loved ones and punctuated by the arrival of new lives.

    Twenty eight days ago, on the bright, crisp Autumn morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, we lost our beautiful baby sister Aisha after a long and debilitating illness…just three days ago, a distant cousin and my uncle Jawaid died suddenly and unexpectedly.

    However, amidst our sorrow, I became an uncle myself with the arrival of my cousin Nadia‘s newborn son, Idris,…only days later, my youngest cousin Yousef was born.

    —

    Last Friday, Boing Boing posted a piece on networked tombstones; though ostensibly a morbid fad, the concept is actually quite sensitively articulated. Each headstone carries a device connected to an online memorial, containing genealogical information, a Facebook profile and a family tree. I find this to be a wonderful concept. Cemeteries are not simple places, but densely layered records of human history – overlapping stories of lives, times, places and people that are our shared heritage. To make available the stories of those lost is a fitting monument to a life and also the basis for a locative medium that speaks to us all.

    A few months ago, I worked with students of IDII on digital identity, exploring the relationships between people, places and time. Many of the projects explored how we relate to places bustling with life and activity – notably cities and airports. To paraphrase James T. Kirk, if how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life then the places where our lives come to rest should be as significant a part of our digital identity as where our lives were lived.

  • Maps Of War

    I’m a Muslim and a map nerd, so this is very cool…

  • Beautiful Serendipity

    YouarebeautifulCrossing the bridge to Granville Island in Vancouver last March, I spotted a cute sticker that read You Are Beautiful and snapped a photo.

    Several months later, a stranger leaves a comment on my photo linking to a photo of themselves at that very location – just a few hours after I was there!

    More photo serendipity – I’m loving these transient Flickr moments 🙂

  • Photo, Mine!

    Staidens_1 Flying back from Paris in June, I managed to shoot some lovely aerial photos of Leeds as we descended into Leeds-Bradford airport. One of the images – took me some time to identify,; eventually user annotations on Google Earth identified it as the St. Aidans opencast mine, flooded a few years ago when the River Aire burst its banks. Today, I received this surprising Flickr message:

    Hi Imran,

    I’ve just found your great aerial photo of St Aidans. I’m a lecturer in Mining and Leeds Uni, and used to work on St Aidan’s 20 years ago. Would you allow me to use your image for lectures at the, and also for a presentation I do for A-level Geology students? Full acknowledgement would be given.It would really help me to finish off the story of St Aidan’s.I look forward to hearing from you.

    Many thanks,

    Toby White
    Leeds University
    Dept. of Mining, Quarry and Mineral Engineering

    Wow! I’ve no idea how Toby managed to find my photo, but I was happy to oblige him. Though I guess, as a former worker at the mine and a lecturer in mining – it’s was probably inevitably serendipitous 🙂

    —

    I can’t wait for the day, Flickr starts to integrate geotagging – it’s just too much of a hassle at the moment. Really, what we need are smarter cameras that can write geotags into the EXIF portion of photos. Cameraphones have the neccessary technology already, but carriers are notoriously protective of their locative data 🙁