This interactive Wall is part of my Thesis for the Master I just completed. It explores the advantages of using visualization techniques to generate multiuser interactivity with a complex set of data in real space. In other words, it is a data visualization displayed on a wall, with which different users can interact simultaneously through their mobile phones and movements around the space. The data to be visualized are messages from other users and it acts in the first instance as a message board, where people can add and retrieve messages in a playful and simple fashion.

The interface was programmed in Java-Processing (http://processing.org) and it is entirely code-generated. A small java Midlet was programmed in the mobile version of the same language (http://mobile.processing.org) in order to be installed in the users’ mobile phones and allow communication between devices. It uses bluetooth to communicate between cellphones and the main application. The installation also uses cameras to track location of the users and react according to the position of each one of them.

hills-eyes-poster

On 1977 Wes Craven released his second film, where a family of mutants capture, torture and dismember everyone who unluckily pass by their house on the hills. The slasher genre fans never stopped making flicks with similar arguments, and even a remake of this film under the same name popped out in 2006. I’ve always liked the title, perhaps because it suggests charmingly the “gaze of the thing” (Lacan-Zizej) in figure of an ever observing landscape. An uncanny contrast between the bucolic and the monstrous.

This idea originated a project that came out of the fascination for reactive structures and graphics I was undergoing at the time: If you could have all those squid or amoeba-like creatures trembling in response to data stimuli, or abstract imagery following someone through a screen in response to light, I was wondering if somehow these were foundational possibilities for a kind of environmental application, a way to interact and be aware of surveillance flows within the city in a rather subtle way.

Because video surveillance and data capture constitute a big, though hidden dimension of our lives within the urbanscape, I found that there was a lot to do around that unnoticed though unavoidable gaze. The idea, simply put, became that of generating reactive simulations out of surveillance data, and use them to provide a dynamic visualization of activity on a public space. Then, observing one of those very usual landscapes that decorate waiting spaces, offices or eating places, it seemed as good material to get hands on and explore a hybrid, pictorial, generated memory of the activity of the observed place. So  Labscape emerged as a way of exploring the basic possibilities on this direction.

I guess the idea was present since those Xerox labs and all the ambient interfaces they planned for ages in Computer Science faculties. Anyhow, the basic appropiation of a common deco object might integrate itself better into contemporary architecture, without pretending to change life itself but to reconfigure the presence and roles of information in our daily lives.