Real-time tracking of police presence would just require some friends
Recently I’ve been looking at the emerging humanitarian uses of collaborative micro-blogging, and in particular Project EPIC’s initiative to define a “folksonomy” of tweet formats to aid Haiti crisis response. I’m currently building a set of Yahoo Pipes feeds that process and locate relevant tweets onto an interactive map (I’ve been hampered by outages in Yahoo Pipes services). Yahoo Pipes is a sort of rudimentary visual programming, that will allow easy reconfiguration by non-programmers once these pipes have been set up. These tools are intended to be easily extendible and “mashable” into new uses.
I’ll post about the Yahoo Pipes work when it’s completed, but needless to say I am aware and involved in the positive potential of augmented reality and surrounding technologies.
I’ve been motivated to write about the negative potential after reading Augmented Planet’s “The Case Against Augmented Reality”. Although it gained some attention as a dissenting voice against the generally positive coverage AR gets, it was a little underwhelming, and even the comments failed (for me) to really go very deep into things. I’m effectively re-posting an annotated version of my comments on that page:
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Computer Aided Architectural Design
Sunday, February 7th, 2010(via Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond blog)
Recently, Bruce Sterling featured Voxopolis (below) on his blog. The project extends Conway’s Game of Life into the 3rd dimension in order to evolve a city design. It is one of six presented in the Helvepolis – Urban Design in Vitro! exhibition, showcasing the work of students at ETH in Zurick, studying Masters of Architectural Studies in Computer Aided Architectural Design:
voxopolis from Dino Rossi on Vimeo.
The ETH Masters program looks at “the use of current information technologies as an augmentation of concepts of architecture. [Exploring] new techniques and methods for design that incorporate scripting and programming languages.” As my interest in the use of computer technology in architecture lie in the areas of understanding inhabitants’ spatial practices to inform design, better engineering, and architectural modeling, I am generally quite cynical towards CAAD projects that look cool, but don’t serve actual human bodies. I have given some personal commentary to a few of the CAAD projects. I’d be curious to hear your views.
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Tags: 3rd Dimension, Abstract Rules, Aided Architectural Design, Architectural Modeling, Architectural Studies, Attractive City, Better Engineering, Bruce Sterling, Computer Aided Architectural Design, Dino Rossi, Game Of Life, Game Rules, Human Bodies, Human Habitation, Interactive City, Masters Program, Personal Commentary, Programming Languages, Rules Of The Game, Vimeo
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