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:
The video above is taken from Rubin’s Flash Panorama Laboratory. It is the result of experiments using non-professional commercial cameras to create “the world’s most affordable video solution capable of shooting and virtually recreating all possible viewing directions of the environment”. As you can see, the custom created video player allows you to move around the field of view, and zoom in and out. You can play with it on their site.
It would be interesting to explore the sense of immersion that could be produced by tying this into a head mounted (or even just more directly mouse controlled) interface, with the possibility of recreating recorded first-person experiences a la Johnny Mnemonic.
Following on from my look at image-based reconstruction of the buildings of a city, I want to explore another type of reconstruction; let’s call it psycho-social. While the image-reconstructions build a cloud of architectural feature points, location-tagged micro-blogging allows the formation of a cloud of social/emotional “enunciation points”.
The video shows reconstructed mesh models of the city of Rome. The meshes were constructed using “Structure from Motion“, a “process of finding the three-dimensional structure by analyzing the motion of an object over time”. In this case, the motion is actually the motion of tourists around the city, capturing the same buildings from many different angles. The power of such an approach is that thousands of creative-commons images of a particular city can be retrieved with a quick flickr search. (more…)
In their use of Google Street View and Google Earth, they demonstrate the collection of freely available location information out there. The 1:1 relationship between the bike “movement” and movement through a VR space is also interesting to explore.
Real-time tracking of police presence would just require some friends
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