Folks were much agog this week as the above video made the rounds – first at New Scientist, and subsequently picked up over at Beyond the Beyond and elsewhere.
Lost in some the dialogue was that both the video and the discussion surrounding it focused not on ’seeing through walls’, as implied by the title, but rather around corners. This is, to be sure, a semantic point – and one that does little to diminish the wow factor of seeing around corners via augmented reality. Still, I was drawn in by the promise of X-Ray-Spex – not, of course, the folks who brought us the seminal ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours’, but rather the idea of peering through the myriad walls that stand between us and those things we covet (or might covet, if only we could see them).
Veering away from the stalker meme implicit in the last paragraph, I offer up a nugget from the past summer, courtesy of ka-d.net:
The video above highlights a promotion for Sony Bravia which allows web users to use an eyedropper-like apparatus to select a color from an image, and submit that color to a series of controls that alter the color value of a series of light bands around the Sony offices in Tokyo.
I don’t find this example altogether profound for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that the end user has little opportunity to experience this change (unless he or she has a view of the store itself), and that those experiencing the color change have little awareness of the cause-effect relationship at play. I also think it to be only peripherally related to the Bravia brand, but that’s for wiser people to ruminate on.
What it does, however, highlight is the joy of dynamic public spaces – that spaces reveal to us their workings and function through what they choose to make public…and here’s where the above augmented reality / x-ray-spex notion gets interesting.
Much like Dan Hill’s explorations of buildings that reveal their functions and activity through metadata (I’m radically over-simplifying and skewing his thoughts – you’d do well to read them from the source), I can imagine a multitude of augmented reality applications that would reveal to us the goings-on inside normally-opaque structures, giving us reasons to explore otherwise-anonymous spaces. Add to that the capability to ’see inside’ not only visually, but with layers of metadata, and the library walls become a snapshot of both the physical activity inside, and the most-recently loaned titles; museums, behind their marble facades, reveal those objects most flocked-to (and flocked-from). The life of a space creates urgency, which spawns interactions, which lead to experiences.
Where else might this go, I wonder?
Related posts:
- Hacking your own products for evergreen content
- The Contextual City
- Seven Inches of Hard Experience
- A Second Life for the Animated GIF
- Detroit, Australian Libraries, Processing and A Place Where Things are Happening