(source: http://storyteller.allesblinkt.com/)
Julian von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus
Abstract
The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.
The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.
New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.
(source: http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2010/sounds-of-hamburg/#more-47177 )
The Philharmonic Orchestra of Hamburg (Philharmoniker Hamburg) merged city and orchestra into one musical experience with Sounds of Hamburg, a web application recognised with a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes International Advertising Festival 2010. Digital cameras were used to transform the city of Hamburg into a concert hall with online users taking the role of conductor. Custom tailored motion tracking made it possible for users to select moving objects from a live video feed. People, ships, cars and even fish become instruments in a spontaneous concert. Venues include The RauthausMarkt, The Landing Bridges on Hamburg Harbour, The Beatles Platz, and a tropical aquarium.
(Source: PS3 Informer http://bit.ly/bD7muE )
Sitting alone in your room one night, a mysterious crack begins to form in your bedroom wall. The lights flicker ominously. Suddenly, an alien tentacle, belonging to some horrific monster, breaks through the crack. One exploratory tentacle and then another reach into the room, looking for prey. Sensing your movement, they sniff the air in your direction. Terrified, you jump to your feet and use the only thing at hand, an aluminum baseball bat, and begin landing blows on the arms as they dart around the room. Grabbing a ballpoint pen from your desk, you stab it deeply into one of the fleshy appendages and it quickly retreats from whence it came. Having survived another onslaught in the augmented reality game Parallax Shift, you hit the autosave on your PS4 and remove your goggles. Welcome to the future of augmented reality, coming very soon to a video game device near you.
Augmented Reality has been looming on the horizon for a while now, but it is finally poised to become a huge part of mainstream gaming. The basic principal is that gameplay incorporates the player's real surroundings into the action, blending the distinction between virtual and real. Hideo Kojima was one of the earliest to experiment with augmented reality in games. His vampire slaying action game Lunar Knights used a light sensor attached to the Gameboy Advance to determine whether the player was in daylight or darkness. In Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, players could download new game characters by driving around and connecting to new wireless hotspots.
More recent examples range from games that use the player's geographic location via GPS, to games that use camera input to project 3D characters into a local scene. The 2008 game Eye of Judgment used a camera attached to the Playstation 3 console to augment a card game similar to Magic: The Gathering. Players would lay their physical cards down on the game surface, and the Playstation 3 would render the monsters represented by each card, which would then do battle on screen. It was a cool trick, but there are many other ways that game developers can exploit augmented reality.
cont.
(Source; http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/most-exciting-part-of-web-isnt-world-w... )
The world wide web removed a sense of space from our lives by connecting everyone on the globe to the same content — totalitarian regimes excepted. But the web’s most promising developments of late indicate that we’re entering a new phase where place matters as much as reach.
Perhaps there is a “there” here after all, in other words, to corrupt Gertrude Stein’s infamous aphorism. Craigslist, Citysearch, and other veterans have long profited from acknowledging that web surfers live in geographic locations, but only recently has the shift from globalization to localization become a major driver of innovation.
Witness the ongoing rise of the New York company Foursquare, whose primary purpose is to tell people where you are. The service added its millionth user in April and was used by the Wall Street Journal to spread news about the attempted Times Square bombing, proving that it’s not just about becoming the mayor of your local coffee shop.
After Entrepreneur named Foursquare the “most brilliant” idea in mobile technology earlier this month, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley said even his team is surprised by the way it continues to grow, over a year after its launch at SXSW 2009.
“Every month, we look at the numbers and think we can’t keep growing at this rate,” said Crowley. “But we do. This thing’s got legs.”
Foursquare requires checking in to locations, but Google Latitude does away with that nicety and broadcasts your location to your friends at all times through your phone. Now that the iPhone supports multitasking, it and other apps that broadcast location passively have the potential to work there, too, providing location-tracking apps with a significant boost.
In other local news, one of the largest providers of ISP routers in the world plans to tag users with anonymous, zip+4 codes so that advertisers can advertise to them locally (or by targeting hundreds of specific neighborhoods nationwide) — even if they’re visiting a general interest website. Our photos and tweets are part of this trend too.
Geo-tagging technology stamps the location where a photo was taken or a tweet was written, forever binding that piece of media to a specific location, so nearby users can access them easily. Flickr was an early supporter of geo-tagging, and as the equipment we use to take photos and send tweets increasingly includes location-aware connectivity if not outright GPS, the trend is set to explode.
Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/most-exciting-part-of-web-isnt-world-w...