A Satnav-Nadsat Samisdat

Middle England meets The Jetsons. Kind of mind-blowing.

“The Earth is becoming unearthly” - Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Bldgblog

Bartlett

23.1.08



RAW NOTES:



Free software and access = no obligation so feeds enthusiasm ?like sunlight or vitamin c?

(He speaks very fast in a NE USA accent this is not going to be a transcript)



Archigram x Ballard x Philadelphia x depression x claustrophobia = start of bldgblog



A catalogue of enjoyment.



Changed his life.

> Map of climate zones in europe projected in europe 2071 from the guardian

How do design climate-appropriately for a rapidly changing climate? What is site-specificity in this dynamic context?

Refs “solastaglia” cf. Collision Detection (http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/12/solastalgia.html) – climate-change melancholy. Losing a homeland without moving anywhere

Will future pharma companies sell you pill to combat climate change

Obsessed by the fact that the earth is becoming unearthly

Showing projected maps of the future coastline is in some senses “adventure tourism”

Be aware of the risks of showing these images – might be exciting rather than prohibitive

Quotes from “The Drowned World”

> Shows billboard architecture

Could climate change refugees be clinging to billboards on the hammersmith flyover?

> Battleship island, japan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island



> Bannermans island: private home of the world’s biggest arms dealer at the time of the spanish-american war



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannerman’s_Castle

Rumour was that he used faulty cannons as rebar-the thoughts of turning weapons into architecture is exciting

> Island fortress of the coast of india

> Maunsell towers off whitstable – influence for archigram

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts

Texas tower off the coast of new jersey – post-war

http://www.radomes.org/museum/documents/TexasTower.html



> Oilrigs by statoil
– Man standing on the seabed

Costs about the same as flat in downtown manhattan / camden designed by rogers

The premium offshore oil-rig market could be tapped into

Dubai terraforming
– The thing that you don’t realise is the scale

Dubai is very disappointing, very boring. Invest that much money and all you can come with is dumb homes for sports-stars? That much hubris, time, money and slave labour? And that?s all you come with? Islands in the shape of a palm tree?



> Artifical reefs – what if archigram had been active in this area?

– Looks remarkable looks like chinese armillary spheres- jesuit astronomy instruments
– The reef has a brand on it.
– In 300yrs when this is a “quote/unquote” a natural object – someone will find a logo.
– Sovereign control of undersea structures: there is a feature under the sea between china and japan. Japanese are cultivating coral in order to grow an island so that they can make the territory claim.

What do artificial islands imply for the future of sovereign territory: is the future of colonialism reef science?



George Perec: worms/table/epoxy

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Users-Manual-Georges-Perec/dp/0879237511

China Mieville: slow sculpture

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/sciencefiction/0,,1312147,00.html

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/demolition-sculptures-or-sandblasting.html



The evolution of the landmass of north america >california is not solid ground – it is “the remnants of islands, former continents, lost indonesias”

Google Earth: Ron blakey geology maps

http://tinyurl.com/223rmr

San andreas fault is itself an assemblage of microfaults



Taipei 101 is activating the surface of the earth – causing minor tectonic faults – is it a long term weapon?



The interaction between architecture, weight and the earth’s surface could be further explored

The more people move to LA and build, the safer it will be to live there. The anti-taipei101. Pin the earth down.

We could be massaging the tension out of the earth surface with traffic.



A view to a kill – christopher walken and “terrestrial weaponisation”

US military: “Earthquake Array”

The us military is the real Archigram.

Modular, portable cities, temporary structures, flexible autonomous cities

Dungeon instancing/sharding: in WoW – what are the implications of that for architecture. If you had billions of dollars and very nimble stagehands you could perhaps achieve this effect in the physical world. If I walk into the same building 5 mins later to you? Is it the same?

Subterranea Brittanica

http://www.subbrit.org.uk/

Where have all the trapdoors gone? Why doesn?t pret-a-manger have trapdoors?

Border tunnels – hidden entrances in cargo containers on the border. Crosses through sovereign space into a store front in mexico. “The border is filigreed with this sort of thing. Landscape experiences that are not available to you if you are law-abiding”

Ground-penetrating radar – non invasive archeology

Underground cities could be faked? if you hack the GPR?

Biking under london from bethnal green to whitehall – in the 80s?

Urban exploration: burgeoning

Michael Cook/toronto: interview on bldgblog

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/drains-of-canada-interview-with-michael.html

Different tunnel technology sound different – you can almost sonically-navigate around

From underworld to offworld

Mars rovers are the landscape photographers of the future

The new landscapes of the sublime are off-world

Kim Stanley Robinson: comparative planetology is a new thought process for humans.

We’re exporting a earth-centric template onto the other.

> Columbia hills complex of mars of memorial sites for dead astronauts

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4143223/

“Mars is becoming earth through our melancholy”

Mars analogue site is being constructed on earth: mars conditions and appearance.

We are making mars like earth and earth like mars, either deliberately on a small scale like this or accidentally on a large scale through climate change :

These are interesting times – “The Earth is becoming unearthly”

Exploratory philanthopy and public-service content

While this might be a typically hilarious technocratic and somewhat bloodless statement by Bill Gates, you have to admire the project itself:

‘”LSST is truly an internet telescope which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. [It is] a shared resource for all humanity – the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe,” he said.’

Gates gives $10m, Charles Simonyi gives 20$m. Various other software billionaires are exploring the human genome, or building space programmes.

In the past I’ve somewhat facetiously wondered what would happen if the BBC used it’s annual billions to move into space exploration, creating entertainments as spin-off.

A question I asked Max and Jack in the pub before Christmas was – what if these ‘exploratory billionaires’ made a land-grab for the public-service broadcaster’s territory instead?

Gates after all already owns Corbis etc., Google is mapping and measuring the Earth constantly for representation. While these are definitely for-profit enterprises, what if Larry and Sergey et al decided not to settle for just Google Earth but go after “Planet Earth” also?

If Google decided to beat the BBC’s Natural History Unit at it’s own game, what would be the result?

What if they decided to devote technology, money, phd’s and determination to mapping, recording, simulating, visualising and telling stories of the natural world with data rather than film. A kind of Quokkafornature, might be one possible outcome I guess.

What if they offered all of the data and assets they gather to scientists, students, schoolkids, storytellers with an open license? What if they gave it to games developers, educators, exhibitions to be used in playful, interactive, engaging ways?

Currently in the domain of natural history, there are efforts to build a ‘commons of content’ such as ARKive that are, pretty good, (although the Terms of Service are not exactly inviting) but you can’t help thinking if someone of the GOOG mindset and resource-base got their hands on it, it would be truly, literally awe-inspiring.

I guess the thrust of my question is what happens when software people with serious resources behind them get very, very serious about what’s traditionally seen as the preserve of ‘content’ or ‘editorial’.

Often at ‘content companies’, especially notable public-service broadcasters (ahem) – the great teams taking technical, systemic approaches to knowledge are indulged and somewhat encouraged at early stages, but if there is a spark of promise then ‘of course someone editorial will be brought in’ above them.

This does not often end well.

The troubling thought, that even in core areas of expertise with glorious heritage such as natural history, we’ll see that public-service broadcasters can, and will get dis-intermediated in a world where data is played with as much as stories are told.

Based on the rise of ‘exploratory philanthopy’ that aims to create “a shared resource for all humanity” as evidenced in quotes like Gate’s above, this might not be a bad thing…

“Do not use while driving”

Many have commented on Google’s new version of Google Mobile Maps, and specifically it’s “My Location” feature.

Carlo Longino homes in on the fact that it provides, finally, a somewhat humane and useful basis for a lot of the location-based services use-cases that mobile service providers and product marketers have salivated over for around a decade.

“I know my own zip code, but I don’t know its boundaries, nor do I know any others here in Vegas. So if I’m out looking for something, I’ve got little idea where to start. That’s the big problem with local search – we tend to spend a lot of our time in the same places, and we get to know them. We’re most likely to use search when we’re in an unfamiliar area – but often our unfamiliarity with the area precludes us from even being able to divine a starting point for our search. You don’t necessarily need GPS to get a starting point, as this new feature highlights.”

GMMv2.0 is sufficiently-advanced technology, not because of the concept behind it (location via cell network is pretty known) but the sheer, apparent quality of execution, simplicity and joy injected into the thing. This is something till now missing from most if not all mobile software, especially Symbian software.

Janne once said to me: “no-one codes symbian apps for fun”, and it shows. It’s enough to get the things working for most developers, and as they’re mostly doing it for a salary rather than fun, they walk away before the joy gets injected, or don’t argue when it gets de-scoped.

GMMv2.0 has some of the lovely touches that we’ve seen from the iPhone implementation carried over – like the location pins dropping into place with a little restitutional bounce. Just. So. It seems quicker and more focussed that v1.0, with location search features working to give the bare-bones info right there on the map rather than breaking-frame to a dialog.

The main, huge, thing though is MyLocation.

Chris gave a talk a few years ago at Etech 2004 called “35 ways to find your location”
, which argued against relying on GPS and ‘satnav’ metaphors for location services.

I don’t know if they downloaded his presentation in Mountain View, but GMMv2.0 delivers on Chris’s vision by not only using cellular location fiding, but how it interprets and displays it. By ditching the assumption that all location tasks are about a -> b in a car, and presenting a fuzzy, more-humane interpretation of your location – it gives a wonderful foundation for wayfinding, particularly while walking, which hopefully they’ll build on.

In other possible advantages that “Do not use while driving” gives you is it become a resource you can use indoors, where I’d guess 90% discussions about where to go and what to do actually happen, and where 90% of GPS’s won’t ever work.

Other contenders in the mobile wayfinding world seem to be pursuing interfaces built on the metaphors and assumptions of the car-bound “satnav” world e.g. Nokia Maps. Probably as a side-effect of most of their senior management driving to work in suburban technology parks everyday!

Actually, Nokia Maps (at least the last version I used, I switched to GMM and haven’t returned) does something even more bizarre when it starts up and shows you a view of the entire earth’s globe from orbit! I cannot think of a less user-centred, task-appropriate entry point into an application!

Very silly.

The Google mobile team are to be congratulated not only for technical innovation in GMMv2.0, but also having the user-experience savvy to step beyond established cliche in a hot area and think in a context-sensitive, user-centred way about the problem.

As Carlo says:

“I continue to be slightly amazed at the speed with which Google gets these apps and services out, and the overall quality of them, though I guess it’s a testament to the amount of resources they’re throwing at mobile these days.”

Can’t wait to see what’s next.

Geonerdery getting easier…

Played for the first time this evening with the Nokia Sports Tracker app on the N95. I placed it in the front pouch of my Brompton bag and set off for the station from the office.



The GPS usually acquires satellites painfully slowly, but it got a fix fairly quickly – helped by being in the middle of semi-rural Hampshire, with the tallest thing for miles being a squat 3-storey technology company HQ…



There’s an “autopause” feature on the app which seems to notice when you’ve been at rest for a while, which is a nice touch – but the best thing was once I’d got home and discovered the ease at which you can export it to something like Google Earth.



It was a three-click operation to save and send the file to my Macbook, where I just double clicked it and swooped in on my little bike ride from orbit.



Magic!

Here 2.0: Big Here, Little Screen

Jason Kottke points to a remarkable post by Kevin Kelly entitled The Big Here, after the Eno-coined-counterpart to the Long Now – which shoots a diamond bullet through my thoughts for the last few months:

At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.

In the post it goes on to take you through a quiz which examines your knowledge of your immediate environs, and the linkages it has to the wider ecosystem.

Here are the first three questions:

30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live:

1) Point north.

2) What time is sunset today?

3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.

Kelly prefaces this with a positioning of the quiz as one of his cool tools>

“The intent of this quiz is to inspire you to answer the questions you can’t initially. I’d like to collect and then post the best step-by-step suggestions about how to answer a particular question. These are not answers to the quiz, but recommended paths on how one might most efficiently answer the question locally. Helpful websites which can provide local answers are wanted. Because of the severe specificity of local answers, the methods provided should be as general as possible. The emerging list of answer-paths will thus become the Cool Tool.”

So far, so good.

Wonderful, even.

My immediate thought though, reading both Jason’s post and Kevin Kelly’s mission is why the hell is this not on a mobile?

So – I over the summer am going to try and knit something together to get it there.

1. I imagine it will be pretty easy (i.e. within the reach of my terrifyingly-bad coding skills) just to port the text quiz to a mobile using S60 python as a standalone experience.


2. It might be easy enough then to both launch web resources from the quiz on the mobile device, and perhaps post answers in some easily-aggregated format to back out to the web from whoever takes the quiz.


3. however might be more tricky…

What I immediately imagined was the extension of this quiz into the fabric of the near-future mobile and it’s sensors – location (GPS, CellID), orientation (accelerometers or other tilt sensors), light (camera), heat (Nokia 5140’s have thermometers…), signal strength, local interactions with other devices (Bluetooth, uPnP, NFC/RFID) and of course, a connection to the net.

The near-future mobile could become a ‘tricorder’ for the Big Here – a daemon that challenges or channels your actions in accordance and harmony to the systems immediately around you and the ripples they raise at larger scales.

It could be possible (but probably with some help from my friends) to rapidly-prototype a Big Here Tricorder using s60 python, a bluetooth GPS module, some of these scripts, some judicious scraping of open GIS data and perhaps a map-service API or two.

One thought that springs to mind would be to simply geotag the results of a quiz (assuming the respondent takes the quiz in-situ!) and upload that to a geowiki, something like Place-O-Pedia.

It might be delightful to see the varying answers from valiant individuals clustered in a location and inspire some collaboration on getting to the ‘right’ answers about their collective bit of the big here or the issues raised by the route there more importantly perhaps.

One open question would be if this ‘Big Here Tricorder’ where realised, would it genuinely raise an individual or community’s awareness of their local ecosystem and it’s connections at other scales? “Every extension is also an amputation” etc.

Well – we won’t know unless we build it.

While we’ve had a couple of year’s noise about Where2.0, I reckon there’s a hell of a lot of mileage and some real good could come of focussing on Here2.0… which gives me a nice little summer project – thanks Kevin, Brian and Jason...

A Manhattan melange of “Macroscopes”

By chance this morning found an excellent mini-exhibition in midtown Manhattan.



“Places & Spaces: Mapping Science” has been curated by Dr. Katy Börner and Deborah MacPherson.



From the website:

“Today, the word “science” encompasses myriad arenas of physical and abstract inquiry. This unique exhibition, at the Healy Hall in midtown Manhattan, uses innovative mapping techniques to physically show what and where science is today, how different branches of science relate to each other and where different branches of study are heading, where cutting edge science is erupting as archipelagos in the oceans of the yet unknown – and – how it all relates back to the physical centers of research. The world of science is turned into a navigable landscape.



Modern mapping imagery has come a long way from Ptolemy. In this stimulating show compelling for all ages and backgrounds, audiences will both visually and tactilely uncover how contemporary scientific thought has expanded. Such visualization of scientific progress is approached through computer-generated relationships, featured on large panels as well through the collaboration of New York based artists W. Bradford Paley, Digital Image Design Incorporated and Columbia University and Ingo Gunther with renowned scientist from the field of scientonometrics: Eugene Garfield, Henry Small, André Skupin, Steven A. Morris, Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans.”

Scientonometrics! Awesome



It’s a concise, enjoyable and clear exhibit showing concrete examples of what John Thackara might call ‘macroscopes’: artworks, mappings and visualisations of complex interconnected systems (in this case science and intellectual property) that help ‘ordinary folk’ examine the choices they make and those being made for them.



Recommended.

People making places

Just wandered tonight along to Demos for the launch of their “People make places” report. A skim on the bus home made it seem the sort of thing I would like the Dan Hills and Anne Galloways of the world to have a look at…:

“The rise of privately owned corporate malls, out-of-town shopping centres and the virtual landscapes of the internet have cast doubt on the publicness of our towns and cities. Privatised space is seen to be in the ascendancy and, it is argued, this is squeezing out the possibility of shared social spaces in our cities, replacing them with a ‘shopping mall culture’ of sanitised, frictionless consumer environments where architecture and technology are used to filter out undesirable people and groups. So far it is unclear whether the new set of public spaces created through the urban renaissance are countering this trend and proving effective hosts for shared public life and exchange between people, or whether they are adding to the loss of publicness by imitating the character of private space. Many of the shiny new quaysides and squares seem either curiously empty of people or curiously monocultural in the type of people they attract.

The mission of Demos over the past 12 months has been to take on this uncertainty and track down the public life of cities – to identify the shared spaces of interaction and exchange, the value that such spaces generate and how that value is created. We explored in depth three cities in the UK – Cardiff, Preston and Swindon – to discover and illuminate the processes by which the public life of cities more widely might be reinvigorated.”

I arrived a little late as I only read about the event on the train back from Farnborough, so I don’t know whether it was covered before I got there, but there was little on the effects of digital technology, particularly personal, mobile digital technology on the use of public space. The debate wasn’t all that, although Greyworld were exciting – pointing out the role of play and playful technologies in invigorating and maintaining public spaces.

There’s a small mention of the venerable grassroots geoguide Knowhere in the report, but otherwise very little investigation it seems (again, I haven’t read it in great depth yet) of the impacts of digital technology.

There is a tantalising section heading: “Visible and invisible choreography” on page 62 of the report [PDF], with a brief mention of NYC’s “311” phone line as a concrete example – but nothing about pershaps, how space and place can be ‘reprogrammed’ smartmobs-style by mobile technologies, or how invisible infrastructures can change a place, e.g. free wifi in Bryant Park. I’m sure there are better examples, but hopefully you get my drift (derive?)

Worth a read, and as I say, I hope some of the more hardcore cyburbanists I know will offer their 2p…

Katrina and Bruce

As Hurricane Katrina makes ‘landfall’, this from the Viridian Design mailing list’s Bruce Sterling:

In the meantime, however, humanity’s incapacity to recognize and deal with its own peril is becoming eerie. And hilarious. Granted, this situation is not going to feel all chucklesome if you’re shivering in the New Orleans Superdome while its parking lots sink underwater, but that awesome mayhem is just the Southern Gothic version of our planet’s rapidly increasing woes. Here comes America’s worst storm ever, yet nobody on this plethora of satellites whispers the obvious: “climate change.” It’s catastrophic. It’s also surreal. A perfect placement for science fiction as political satire.

Watching the CNN coverage is surreal, he’s right.

They are covering it like a sports event – and inventing a psuedoscientific argot of catastophe as they go along: “wobble factor”, “cone of possibility” etc.

Wierd.

---

Update: AD calls out BS on his apparent glee.

I’m not sure you can call it “Virtual Earth”

If this is what you get when you search for London.



I love that there are places called “Sublimity City” and “Deer Lick” neighbouring the great metropolis.

Where (are the people) 2.0

Liz’s notes on the recent O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, even though she says they are sketchy, give a lot of food for thought (and they are funny, but it probably helps if you can imagine Liz recounting them, arms-a-waving) – I’m looking forward to her promised post-4th-of-July reflections.

Overall, it sounds like it was a fascinating carpet-mindbombing of the state-of-the-art of geographical technology and it’s effects on business and society. Wish I’d seen Nathan Eagle, and Kevin Slavin in particular.

One line in her notes will be thought about (and probably written about) much more by me:

“as always, they [O’Reilly] think that the difference between the desires of early and late adopters is one of size, not kind”

Crossing the Chasm was first published 14 years ago. Pre-web, pre-mobile. And yet the tech industry is still set in it’s belief that the mainstream will inevitably, steadily, globally – follow the alpha-geek early adopter. Surely it’s about time the Valley’s “Whig” telling of technological progress is tempered with the wiggly nature of human desire.

Shanghai sunset at speed

Shanghai sunset at speed
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Practical Mirrorworlds

Back when I was an architecture student, twelve (ahem!) or so years ago, one of the books I read with most lasting impact was “MirrorWorlds” by David Gelertner, the computer scientist perhaps most famous for being targeted and injured by the Unabomber.

In “MirrorWorlds”, Gelertner imagines powerful software providing models and simulations of the ‘real world’ and the change in our understanding and society that will arise from that.

Amazon.com’s page on the book says this by way of synopsis:

Imagine looking at your computer screen and seeing reality—an image of your city, for instance, complete with moving traffic patterns, or a picture that sketches the state of an entire corporation at this second. These representations are called Mirror Worlds, and according to David Gelernter they will soon be available to everyone. Mirror Worlds are high-tech voodoo dolls: by interacting with the images, you interact with reality. Indeed, Mirror Worlds will revolutionize the use of computers, transforming them from (mere) handy tools to crystal balls which will allow us to see the world more vividly and see into it more deeply.

Creating ‘mirrorworlds’ has long been a dream that we can see repeated in the history of ideas, from Buckminster-Fuller’s World Game to the 1:1 scale map commissioned by Borges’ ficitonal emperor:

“…In that Empire, the Cartographer’s art achieved such a degree of perfection that the Map of a single Province occupied an entire City, and the Map of the Empire, an entire Province. In time, these vast Maps were no longer sufficient. The Guild of Cartographers created a Map of the Empire, which perfectly coincided with the Empire itself.”

Recently, Larry and Sergey, our current information-emperors released Google Maps into the world.

Google Maps is an incredibly refined user experience, combining a number of valuable datasets that Google acquired, a great UI utilising cutting edge interface-code thinking, and as you’d expect some very efficent back-end technology.

This being the age of “Web 2.0” every application of merit is also invariably a platform whether it plans to be on not, so Google Maps has spawned some amazing innovations by its users: like Jon Udell’s audio-annotated maps [see also Charlie Schick from Lifeblog’s thoughts on this type of ‘life-recording’], and the fantastic Craigslist Housing Hack, which is a powerfully useful merger of small-ads listings for accomodation with the google maps interface .

Google, a few weeks after launching the Maps service, integrated satellite imagery from it’s acquisition of Keyhole. Again, the user-base seized upon this and started making their own uses, and moreoever, using this to tell stories.

Take a look at Flickr’s Memory Map group [See this Wired News story for more on the meme], where people are using Google Maps to tell stories about childhood, where they grew up or memorable events. Another trends is exemplifed by MezzoBlue’s post “Google Maps and Accountability” where the satellite imagery is used to illustrate the extent of environmental damage done by the forestry industry in British Columbia.


^ Google Maps Satellite Image of La Jolla, California

And thus, a new view on the world around which you can inspire new thinking or action.

Which is precisely the promise of software simulation and modelling proposed by Gelertner a decade ago in Mirrorworlds.

Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” is rapidly creating practical mirrorworlds for us to explore.

Imagine a future Google mirror world, which:

• Is real-time:
  with live satellite imagery showing weather, jet-streams, pollutant flow, traffic jams, cattle herds, refugee camps…


• Has overlays:
  showing visualisations of abstract data – population density, energy use, wealth, “now playing”, infant mortality

And crucially…

• Has history:
  Could show all the above, either from archive data, or simulation ansed on the historical record – from 1970, 1940, 1900, 1800, 1600… etc… etc…

What realisations and reactions would we have if we could gaze into this mirrorworld knowing it was real, not a simEarth, and further more – the only one we’ve got?

It would be the software-equivalent of when the space program in the late-sixties afforded us the first view back at the pale blue dot we’re stuck on.

We are the first ‘simulation-generation’ – we are used to constructing and manipulating ever more sophisticated models of reality or unreality on our personal computers.

Increasingly, what has started out in the mirrorworld of play that the videogame industry invents is revolutionising how we work and learn.

In their book “Got Game”, business strategists John Beck and Mitchell Ward state:

It’s the central secret of digital gaming… Games are providing real, valuable experience… [they] offer real experience solving problems that, however, fantastic their veneers, seem real to the player. When gamers head off to play, they are escaping. But… they end up in an odd-looking educational environment.”

And in education, PC-pioneers like Alan Kay are pursuing ‘mirrorworld’ like learning environments, driven by the mantra that “point-of-view is worth 80 IQ points”

Mobile mirrorworlds could give you that IQ boost Kay is working towards wherever you were. Augmented-reality researchers have been donning back-packs full of computers and ridiculous looking head-up displays for a decade or so, trying to build them.

A more practical, accesible version is being built bottom-up using cameraphones, web-services and primative locative technologies right now. Not only Google – but Yahoo, Amazon/a9 and a host of hackers and start-ups are setting about skinning the world in data.

Once these substrates are there, you can bet that manipulable models and visualisations will be built atop them. This is the other component of the mirrorworld: the “what-if” wonderlands you can explore with a software model of reality.



We have always built models to understand how reality works – by taking them to breaking point, changing our approach, exploring the alternatives; we’ve made progress. We’re up against real problems casued by that progress – many parts of the pale blue dot are at breaking point – so making better decisions based on better models is crucial. Mirrorworlds are not just a playful diversion or powerful business tool – but a survival strategy.

Before I get too misty-eyed for the mirrorworld future of sustainability, happiness and harmony, a (hyper)reality check. There are some powerful players switched-on to the power of simulation.

Bill Gates and Microsoft are actively pursuing it

“modeling is pretty magic stuff, whether it’s management problems or business customization problems or work-flow problems, visual modeling. It’s probably the biggest thing going on”

What happens to our understanding of reality when there’s a monopoly on mirrorworlds?

French philosopher Baudrillard, in his “Simulation and simulcra” (You’ve read it right? I bet BillG has…;-) in reference to the mirrorworld mapping of Borges’ emperor, warned that:

“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.”

In order to see that our new digital/real mirrorworlds reverse the Baudrillian desertification of the real world, it is crucial that we can not only understand the territory, but who and how they have done the mapping and their modelling – that we can own it, examine it and remap/remodel it ourselves – that the maps and models are open, free and shared by all.

The peer-production and scrutiny of the Wikipedia (and indeed the ideological discussion around it) might give some idea of what it’s like to create a reference work of this kind.

Then we will have mirrorworlds that we can all build on.

====
A side note – as part of Amazon’s mirrorworld of the printed word, they have introduced SIPs: “statistically-improbable phrases” that are supposed to automagically sum up the essence of a book. Here are the SIPs for “MirrorWorlds”:

chronicle streams, software ensembles, computational landscape, task cloud, simulated mind, evocative possibility, ensemble programs, tuple spaces, information machinery, mass border, software revolution, memory pool, software machine, information machines

Game cities

^ Barcelona’s Cerda Grid (from http://odin.let.rug.nl/~kastud/barca/)

What makes a good game city?

I mean this in the sense that it makes for a great physical setting for playing a game such as ‘Gridlockd’ in. Which cities are good game cities? How would you construct an ideal game city?

Is a great city for playing a game in, the same as a great city for playing in?

What is a playful city?

Gridlockd, Cities and Slow Games

Gridlockd by Mohit SantRam of NYU ITP sounds fascinating:

...an urban game where participants within one of four teams compete to capture grid positions in a half hour. the team with the most points wins! This project is meant to display how semacodes, cameraphones, ad-hoc groups, and social dynamics are effected under time pressure.

It’s going to be one of these fun ‘big games’ which create lots of spectacle, but looking at the core gameplay: capture grid positions... I wonder if it wouldn’t be more satisfying as a slower, more strategic game played over a much much longer timeframe.

As our own Greg Costikyan has said – latency in the mobile network makes it very hard to create real-time games. In Gridlockd – they are using walkie-talkie functionality to enable this – the phone is not the communications channel – it is a mobile networked computer for recognising physical/location data…

So why not play to the strengths of asynchronous communications instead, and harness an entirely different, more casual, less spectacular form of play.

I’m imagining a kind of urban location-based reversi that two people could play over a long time span – kind of like a play-by-mail game, but play-by-city…

This game would still using semacodes/QR-codes/NFC for the game grid positions. Janne Jalkanen has demonstrated how easy it is to create NFC/web services for presence – perhaps it would be possible to very quickly create such a game. Perhaps there could be some grid positions that were in coffee-shops where the players could meet and discuss the moves.

Of course, there are only some urban locations where the image of the city would match with the image of the game board. Manhattan and other big grid-structured US cities seem more ideal for urban games than European cities?

Matt Locke, a few years ago, wrote about slow-networks in cities a few years ago, using ‘public caches’ – bluetooth or IR connected public digital stores – what are the opportunities for slow-networks city-gaming?