The geoRSS Layar Gateway – An overview from Josh Harle on Vimeo.

There is an example geoRSS feed that you can base your own on.

It is possible to create links that – when viewed on your iPhone – will automatically open Layar, the geoRSS gateway, and your geoRSS feed, using the following format:

layar://georssgateway?CHECKBOXLIST=1&SEARCHBOX=the tinyURL version of your feed

Please use the comments section to report any bugs or suggestions.

Date:
Wednesday 8^th – Friday 10^th
September 2010 (Mid-semester break)

Sessions:
10am – 3pm each day, with lunch provided. Selective attendance
is possible.

Venue:
Design @ Eng, level 5 , Mechanical Engineering Building, UNSW, Sydney

CONTEXT

There is a rich pallet of user-friendly tools on the web today that can be mixed and matched (and mashed) together to produce incredible
results. Artists and designers are the perfect practitioners to apply lateral thinking and creativity to their engagement with these tools. There is just a small step to grasping them, which can be eased by real-world examples and demonstrations.

DETAILS

We will be looking at cutting-edge photo-reconstruction software, to learn how to take images and finish with a real 3D printed object! Other tools introduced are video hosting (YouTube, Vimeo), image hosting (Flickr, Picassa), blogs and online maps (Yahoo Maps, OpenStreetMap, Google Maps), exploring how they can be combined into exciting new visualisations using mashup tools (Yahoo Pipes, Dipity).

The workshop is intended to teach this collection of exciting tools, and help facilitate the development of ideas participants may want to bring along. Participants can work individually or collaboratively, and after an initial introduction to each tool, studio work will begin with hands-on assistance.

OUTCOME

There’ll be an opportunity to print your own reconstructed objects, and finished projects will be presented and documented at the end of the workshop, and displayed on the workshop website.

INTERESTED?

Please email josh.harle@gmail.com indicating if you can attend all or select sessions. We have limited places and will favour choosing full participants.

My paper was on Michel de Certeau and how we experience space (…and place/location/architecture), and how our engagement with it can take the form of experimentation. It travels via Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari, and quietly stewarded by Bachelard, and Debord.

Annotated notes are in the second half.

Tactical and Strategic Experimentation in Space – Conference Presentation

Friend, Artist and aspiring Architect Melody Williams has just installed these chalk boxes in Camperdown Memorial Park. See if you can find them and have a draw.

The park is located in the centre of Newtown, Sydney’s hip, alternative suburb. A long wall down the length of it forms a great canvas for graffiti, and it is constantly being reworked. I’ve made a PhotoSynth of the wall, that lets you navigate along it and zoom in to areas of interest. As well as the images I’ve taken, there are a handful of Creative Commons Flickr images, and this lets you see how the graffiti has changed in the last few weeks. I’ll go back in a few weeks and add more images to the set, and hopefully capture some changed sections and overwritten marks.

View the PhotoSynth to navigate through the park (you will need to download the Silverlight plugin first-time).

 
Here in Sydney at the moment we are in the middle of Vivid Sydney, a festival of “light, music and ideas”. As part of the festival, a number of historic buildings are being “augmented” with projected animations telling their history in an intervention called Macquarie Visions:

Macquarie Visions casts a new light onto Sydney’s ceremonial street, celebrating in stunning and immersive light displays, the 200th anniversary and story of two great visionary leaders, Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his wife Elizabeth.

The Macquaries’ innovations are revealed with illuminating, theatrical and contemporary light displays in a family friendly free night…

These projections are effectively an analogue version of the sort of Augmented Reality applications we should expect to see in the next few years. (In fact, the AusWiki AR layer does a similar job of pulling up Wikipedia entries associated with important Sydney buildings.) Here, the City has a vested interest in presenting a specific version of history, for the sake of promoting Sydney. The “family friendly” narrative of Sydney space excludes a great deal from its account of history.

 
So we have one account of Sydney, from The Man himself, but how do we challenge this particular constructed representation of the city and its history?

Competing for Legitimate World View

We could challenge the authoritative representation of the world with our own. Present an alternative history of Sydney, that goes into the dark side of a major colonial invasion.

Where the infrastructure and investment of putting this data out there is in the hands of those with particular vested interests (everyone has vested interests), the landscape becomes awash with conflicting (yet authoritative) messages. The Nike True City iPhone app presents you with the one, “true” account of the real nitty-gritty, sub-culture-icious city, while the Mastercard app tells of a city made for shopping.

This is the idea behind feedback sections and comments to blogs posts and online news articles. These are polemic and partisan: they encourage competing (for legitimacy and for the last word) versions of history/truth. People only comment when they feel motivated to by either strong disagreement or agreement.

In the context of modern news, this is suggested as a “balanced view” and an acknowledgement of a post-modern awareness of differing viewpoints, but it does not help radically open up thinking on a subject. In fact, for every conflicting answer, the question becomes more rigidly, implicitly accepted as in the case of “Do you still beat your wife?” or “Would you give up freedom for security?”.

As I have discussed before, when talking about the meaning of urban space, these conflicting maps of the city are all guilty of the same violent removal from context, and insertion into a system of commodities and productive logic. This is no more true than when arguing, for example, that Skating is a sport and/or legitimate form of transport. Elements of the city are swapped out for a signifier of their standing-reserve – shopping, housing, or a fun night out. What is implicitly accepted here is a denial of the psychological landscape of the city, and the lived experience within it, in favour of an overarching strategic logic.

The Poetic City

While the Macquarie Visions event is definitely a fairly engineered, sanitised (“family-friendly”) and biased account of Sydney’s history, I am not arguing against such a history from a purely ideological point. I’m not totally embracing post-modernism and suggesting a single coherent narrative is without use. My critique concentrates on the relationship to lived experience. Context is lost in abstraction. The official line is a view which (fundamentally) removes the emotional complexity, and tends to fit into a productive/political logic that can’t handle these ambiguities.

I am looking to encourage a “tactical” engagement with space, which resists the mandated official line without directly countering it. This acknowledges the social constitution of a space; how a park is transformed by its use; how night streets can be sinister or inviting not based on a label on a map, but on the sounds of others’ practice of the space.

This emotionally-invested, “lived” engagement with the city was explored by the politio-art group Situationists International through Psychogeography. Psychogeography offered

a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities[...] just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into new awareness of the urban landscape…

Joseph Hart, 2004

that challenged the assumed dominance of a functional model of the city.

 
Psychogeographical map by Guy Debord
 

How can we encourage the writing of complementary “poetics of space”, that evocatively sketch a rich emotive landscape to challenge the spatial politics of commerce?

Emerging location-aware, networked devices seem like the perfect way to generate and share these playful paths through the city, after all aren’t they the acme of human communication? The problem is that the rational logic that was used to develop them is also ingrained in their operation. These are devices for harnessing, controlling, and observing the world; they are extremely good at ordering and creating inventories, and at enframing the ambiguousness of everyday life into something succinct and readable (Facebook tells us that “Josh Harle is late for work and feeling sad ” ).

Currently Augmented Reality applications utilise the familiar listing, searching and ordering mechanisms for navigating through a representation of space. These mechanisms allow us to “direct and optimize” our experiences like the production processes they were originally created to support.1 Not that this isn’t useful, but it is far removed from an emotional space.

Instead of making a statement, ask a question: what does this site mean to you? Attempt to geared away from simply a response to conflicting opinions. We could build an interconnected mind-map from different nodes of locations and ideas, that allows for the free association between concepts. Like hitotoki’s snippets of located literature, building up from vignettes of experience to form a field of intensity that forms the site. It is also important to keep the author as connected to the thoughts. It is disingenuous to remove the context of the viewpoint from what is being created.

Snippets from the Hitotoki website

Augmented Reality seems to offer a great tool for presenting an Inventory of Places that stakes its claim to truth. In looking to use AR to explore tactical space, this mind-map system seems like a fertile area of research.

 
1. In critique of the Situationists, they could be accused of contriving “situations” for new experiences in a way similar to this directed process.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m reading spatial theorist Michel de Certeau for an account of spatial practices. De Certeau emphasises the inadequacy and restrictiveness of abstract representations of place as administered by authority (land owners, city planners, architects), and exposes the everyday lived experience of space which is enacted beyond it. The abstract conception of place is held by those with established, demarcated territory, who attempt to control and survey it. He calls this action Strategic. In contrast to this is the Tactical; the everyday poaching of space as we move through the city, working subtly and intuitively against the logic of the Strategic model, while jaywalking or short-cutting across the grass or squatting.

The central point he makes is that the Strategic representation loses it’s responsiveness and insight as it becomes distanced from the actual context of experiences. The Strategic attempt to survey the “bigger picture” invariably creates this distance by cleaving out anything outside of its “scope”.

One area beyond its scope is the mythic/affectual relationship to space. Mechanistic analysis of people in ordered economic/productive places are unable to account for or capture psychogeography. The personal idiosyncrasies of a walker’s path from A to B form a sort of poetry of space; utilising a standard vocabulary, but in an way that is evocative beyond its representable meaning:

“[Tacticians] trace ”indeterminate trajectories” that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space through which they move. They are sentences that remain unpredictable within the space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems. Although they use as their material the vocabularies of established languages (those of television, newspaper, the supermarket or city planning), although they remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes (the temporal modes of scedules, paradigmatic organizations of places, etc.), these ”traverses” remain heterogenous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires.”

– de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (p35)

Here an illustration of how “lived reality” is lost-in-translation into abstract representations (maps, statistics, concepts such as the City) would be to imagine poems summed up literally: “A man walks alone around the hills, then sees some flowers“.

However, far more concrete elements are also lost in the process of being integrated into a surveillance view. The context of any event – crucial to understanding it in its specificity – is also reduced away in a Strategic view.

“Indeed, this ”representation” is insufficient, [because] time and movement are reduced to [something] read in a single movement. However useful this ”flattening out” may be, it transforms the temporal articulation of places into a spatial sequence of points. […] It is thus a mark in place of acts, a relic in place of performances: it is only their remainder, the sign of their erasure. Such a projection postulates that it is possible to take the one (the mark) for the other (operations articulated on occasions).”

So it is interesting to see an article in Directions Magazine (“an online magazine covering geospatial technology”) regarding recent trends in Law Enforcement’s use of spatial knowledge that seemed to indicate Authority is becoming more Tactical. The article lists “10 Trends Driving More Effective Law Enforcement”:

1. Borderless mapping: “Many analyses today are based on pre-existing boundaries that have nothing to do with real-world behavior. In practice, criminals will strike on both sides of a street regardless of whether they are in different towns or postal codes. With hotspot mapping, which is not based on pre-defined zones, analysts can easily identify trends that go beyond standard map borders. In one case, a police force discovered a pattern of crimes along a rail line that spanned six jurisdictions…”

   I’d argue that this is just shifting the border to the next biggest context. At some point there is the level of nation, or the end of surveillance or access to statistics.

2. Social landscape: “Spatial analysis paired with demographic data allow crime analysts to easily consider the affluence, buying patterns, age, traffic patterns and demographics of those involved in criminal activity – comparing the relationship between victims and offenders. In big-picture terms, location intelligence adds a quantifiable element to strategic planning.”
3. Temporal analysis: “The social landscape of certain geographies may change over the course of a day. A financial district may attract a workforce by day and club goers by night, factors that are not captured in traditional map applications.”
4. 3-D mapping: “In some areas, police are looking at criminal activity on a third dimension…”,

   The article is even kind enough to remind us what this dimension is: “height”, that pesky 3rd dimension that maps have been generally ignoring since their invention, so far up to and including Google maps et al.

5. Public data sharing
6. Real-time connectivity: “events are captured and reported via live data connections”

   Works against de Certeau’s description of Strategic systems; “these points form on a space that is supposed to be synchronic or achronic. The idea that in a map all points are both without time, and synchronous. This would be analogous to the coloured pins in a wallmap referenced in the article.

7. Ubiquitous access.
8. Community cooperation: “The ability to publish data via the Internet can facilitate cooperation between police and local civic groups, improving communications and making it easier for communities to participate in crime prevention measures”

   The inter-university group called project EPIC have written about this a fair bit. They point out the immense power of peer-to-peer emergency response, mediated through social media networks, and indicate the difficulty that government command-and-control systems generally have in handling information and help from these sources.

9. Environmental analysis.
10. Cloud-based collaboration.

Perhaps this is the trend: new technology extending the depth and granularity of the surveillance. Enframing the world in a few more dimensions, and across a few more vectors of meta-tag information. This is always still the point at which something is represented and the non-representable (for now) is left behind. Still the line in the dirt between “our territory” and the emotions and mythos, rumours and beliefs or feelings. Let’s say that when the microscopic world was discovered, the slides of life teeming in water were as much a testament to the unperceived nano-scale.

In a similar vein to the image-matching against point-clouds that was demonstrated in the Bing Maps TED talk, PhotoCity is aiming to progressively construct a 3D scan of the world. To this end they have released a free iPhone app that displays current scans, and encourages users to compete to fill in gaps in the scans. Currently there is a limited number of locations available to add to, but you may start your own “seeds”, which will create new areas to improve. I’m thinking of committing to a University of New South Wales seed – any helpers?

Edit: Still waiting for my building seed to be processed from this morning. The project is very new, so hopefully the delay is because they have a backlog, and not because they have abandoned processing new locations all together.

Earlier this year, the UK-based Prospect magazine featured an article by Stewart Brand (publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue) entitled “How slums can save the planet”.

The article looks at lessons that can be learned from the organic arrangement and efficient reuse of slums, as well as making the controversial claim that cities are the actually green. As architect Peter Calthorpe suggests:

“The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.”

It’s an interesting polemic to conventional wisdom, although it is hard to know how much it relies on ignoring the rural and overseas industries working to provide for the cities.

For slums in particular, there are some green practices imposed by needs:

Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

and

…in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day.

As some of the post comments point out, Brand has a particularly romantic idea of the transformative element of living in the cities. While he acknowledges that cities “concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment”, he also sees new residents as naturally “progress[ing] from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan”, with everything that entails.

If nothing else, it is an interesting call to investigate City Planning practices against spaces defined by a lack of planning. But as always a system that develops as highly responsive to specific needs – such as a shanty town – may have difficulty incorporating less immediate needs such as protection from Earthquake or fire risk.

Posting a little late, via Beyond the Beyond: A Museum of London Augmented Reality iPhone app that gives you access to a library of historical, geotagged images. While the screenshots have been meticulously constructed to be perfectly registered, having seen the level of precision mobile AR is up to at the moment this is going to take some work to reproduce. The results look a lot like a PhotoSynth match up of two images, which is something of a foreshadowing of the near future when these geotagged images will be more intelligently plugged into a point-cloud of the persistent architecture (the corners and cornices of those old buildings that haven’t changed for decades).

For the moment it’s a reminder of the growing body of located media, along with digitisation and making machine-legible of formerly fuzzy content of our world.

I’ve discussed (with examples of a reconstruction from Newcastle) some of the technologies for doing 3D reconstruction. PhotoSynth is by far the easiest way to get into this, but it is not as powerful as some other options.

For example, PMVS2 allows you to reconstruct a detailed 3D point-cloud, and takes as its input a collection of images, and parameters about the position and intrinsics of the cameras.

Helpfully, the latest version of SynthExport allows you to export the camera parameters from your PhotoSynth, for use in the more powerful reconstruction. I have written a javascript form that generates the two input files needed for the PMVS2 pipeline.

Edit: The focal length is now being calculated correctly, but there is a problem with the data – it is not processing correctly. The rotation matrix calculations are from a great matrix calculator and seem to be working fine, and the translation are just simply brought over directly from PhotoSynth. I don’t have a good way to plot these points myself, but I might ask a colleague to give it a try for me. Obviously I’m keen to get this up and running ASAP, so please comment for feedback and revision suggestions!

Edit: I am working on getting the correct format for piping PhotoSynths to PMVS.

Here are the side-by-side comparisons between the PhotoSynth output for the Newcastle Freeze Mob Synth, and my offline Bundler processing. PhotoSynth did better at finding camera positions, so there are more cameras in the view. (PhotoSynth is related to Bundler – they are built on the same code.) These models were produced using 3D Studio Max and two script generators; one that worked from the PhotoSynth camera parameters file, and the other that processed the Bundler output. The processing for Bundler output is guided by the Bundler Documentation, though something is obviously awry.

If you review the Synth you will see the rough path that the camera takes through the scene, and the PhotoSynth output is a perfect representation of this. Note that the camera does not really rotate as it passes through, it does a smooth dolly-shot across the scene.

In the image below, you can see that the cameras twist rotations, which was not accurate.

The Bundler output looks at least partly right because the translation section of the matrix is not part of the rotation matrix from the bundle.out file, so at least the cameras are in the correct shape, although the axis are switched.

Here’s a comparison of results from the Kermit example images for Bundler (view PhotoSynth):

The camera positions embedded in the Bundler point-cloud above are pretty much identical to those from the PhotoSynth output below.

But I can’t get the camera positions from the Bundler output file in the correct format (and thus get PhotoSynth output into the same format). Here’s what I get; for a start the cameras are on a different axis, and the positions are mirrored.

And here is the file output:

PhotoSynth camera positions

Bundle.out file

which I bring into transformation matrices as