This weeks NewScientist has a good article entilted ‘3D mash-up maps let you ‘edit’ the world. Written by Colin Barras it notes that armchair explorers who soar over 3D cityscapes on their computer may be used to the idea of maps with an extra dimension. But they are now getting accurate enough to offer much more than a preview of your next holiday destination. Accurate, large-scale 3D maps could soon change the way we design, manage and relate to our urban environments.’
Paul notes that Flame was used to composite the movie with a sneaky bit of his own 3D included. The HD helipad in the city shot was modeled and lit by Paul in 3D Max with baked lighting for import into Flame.
The papers are coming thick and fast at the Future Internet Journal – the latest paper describes a follow up Web 2.0 approach to a technology enhanced master course for students of Graz University of Technology.
The lecture “Social Aspects of Information Technology” has a long tradition for using new didactical scenarios as well as modern e-Learning technologies. After using a blogosphere one year ago, this year microblog channels helped to expand the traditional lecture. Students choose (on a voluntary basis) whether they want to participate in a blogging/microblogging group instead of using conventional methods called Scientific Writer/Scientific Reviewer. This study addresses the question whether this method can change the learning outcome into a more reflective one. Furthermore, peer-reviewing groups judge the quality of essays and blog contributions. In this paper we examine if microblogging can be an appropriate technology for assisting the process. This publication comes to the conclusion that an amazing potential and a new way to work with information is opened when using microblogging. Students seem to be more engaged, reflective and critical in as much as they presented much more personal statements and opinions than years before.
The paper is an interesting look at Web 2.0 and blogging in academia – something we know a little about having come under notable criticism a few years ago for putting everything we do in a blog. Personally, the Future Internet Journal is indicative of these changes with fast turn around times and publication in terms of weeks rather than months/years.
The Sentient City Survival Kit is a design research project that explores the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. It takes as its method the design, fabrication and presentation of a collection of artifacts, spaces and media for survival in the near-future sentient city.
– edit, video is now back, via YouTube –
As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, information processing becomes embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Pervasive/ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban information systems capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring our behavior within it and becoming an active agent in the organization of our daily lives.
The movie above is a work in progress of an intriguing project by Mark Shepard documenting the development of a set of artifacts, spaces and media for survival in the near-future sentient city.
Of note is the view that ‘many are likely to protest when they are denied passage through a subway turnstile because the system “senses” that their purchasing habits, mobility patterns and current galvanic skin response (GSR) reading happens to match the profile of a terrorist’. Personally we quite like the idea of a Sentient City, but perhaps that’s just us, head over to http://survival.sentientcity.net/ for more thoughts and views.
This weeks NewScientist has a good article entilted ‘3D mash-up maps let you ‘edit’ the world. Written by Colin Barras it notes that armchair explorers who soar over 3D cityscapes on their computer may be used to the idea of maps with an extra dimension. But they are now getting accurate enough to offer much more than a preview of your next holiday destination. Accurate, large-scale 3D maps could soon change the way we design, manage and relate to our urban environments.’