No abstract

Digital and synthetic worlds are often conceived as self-contained entities that exist in abstracted and remote spaces. The author elaborates an approach to hybrid space that instead focuses on local contexts of digital information correlated with the embodied spaces people inhabit-an informational substrate that both describes and regulates human activity. The author presents a mobile interactive art installation as a way to bring geographically referenced information out of databases and into everyday experience of traveling through the world. Datascape enables a hybrid ecology whereby participants author dynamic geographic narratives that compose a digital world coextensive with the planet Earth. A vehicle-mounted digital periscope engenders action between passengers and a visual and sonic landscape that unfolds and emerges based on conversations between people, data, and dynamic representational entities that compose the landscape. By allowing people to view and interact with information descriptive of the location in which it is encountered, Datascape enables awareness of and engagement with the hybrid digital/physical spaces people traverse and inhabit in their everyday lives.

Developers have created real-time control systems in various engineering applications, dramatically increasing systems' efficiency by saving energy, regulating the dynamics, and increasing robustness and disturbance tolerance. But can a city function as a real-time control system? MIT's WikiCity project aims to find out.A real-time control system has four key components:

SignalPlay is a sensor-based interactive sound environment in which familiar objects encourage exploration and discovery of sound interfaces through the process of play. Embedded wireless sensors form a network that detects gestural motion as well as environmental factors such as light and magnetic field. Human interactions with the sensors and with each other cause both immediate and systemic changes in a spatialized soundscape. Our investigation highlights the interplay between expected object-behavior associations and new modes of interaction with everyday objects. Here we present observations on embodied network interaction and suggest opportunities for further investigation in this field.

Datascape is a periscope device that allows its operator to view invisible data about the surrounding city. As the user travels through geographic space, they simultaneously explore a 3D virtual topography built from invisible datasets, such as demographic marketing segmentation. As they explore the city, they control a dynamic soundtrack that is generated from local data including the "listening preferences" of the surrounding community. A typical commute or drive around town is turned into a sonic and visual exploration of hidden narratives that surround us and envelop the city.