End-of-Year Thoughts
Tuesday, December 19, 2000
by Mark Hurst
This evening I was fortunate enough to attend the "winter show" of the New York University's ITP (Interactive Telecommunication Program), where the students displayed their end-of-semester projects.
All of these works had something to do with interactive technology... and they were good. Some of them were more engaging, creative, and thought-provoking than anything I've seen in the Web industry this whole year. Several of the projects pointed toward the coming emergence of bit literacy and related issues; hence these end-of-year thoughts.
One of the most striking pieces was the "wooden mirror," built somewhat like the highway signs, or train station displays, that flip black or neon "pixels" (actually small plastic tiles) into place to spell a message. In this case, the pixels were made of wooden tiles, whose sides were light or dark-colored wood. The key to the piece was a hidden video camera that captured the image of a person walking up to the mirror. The wood "pixels" would then flip into place to display, approximately real-time, the image that the videocamera saw. You could wave your arm in front of the "mirror" and see the dark tiles do the wave, right about where your arm was.
I liked the irony in the wooden mirror: real bits (the videocamera) fed into the wooden atoms (the tiles) that pretended to be bits (pixels), which in turn formed an image that looked somewhat like the atom-based person (waving his arm). Bits to atoms to bits to atoms.
This idea of bits and atoms cooperating, of trading roles, appeared a few different times in the projects. One of my favorites used a video camera, a fish tank with two live goldfish, and three computer monitors. Here's how it worked: the video camera stayed focused on the fish tank, and fed the streaming video into the first computer monitor. So the first monitor showed an decent-looking video feed of the fish swimming around. Next to it, the second monitor showed a pixellated version of the first monitor (meaning the image was the same but much more blocky, since the pixels were effectively much bigger). Thus the second monitor asked the question: how few pixels -- how few bits -- before you'll accept that the image doesn't look "real"?
The third and final monitor was just a genius stroke: it showed the same image, except instead of pixels (big or small), it represented the fish with ASCII characters -- the pixels of each fish were letters. So on the monitor was a moving, fish-shaped image made up of several rows of "fishfishfishfish"... If you've ever seen "ASCII art" in some people's e-mail signatures, just imagine a fish-sized shape -- moving in the same direction as the real fish in the fish tank. Yes, it was real-time streaming ASCII video. This was one rich project.
The fish project asked: what kind of bits need to represent fish-atoms? Must they be conventional picture-element bits, or might they be old-fashioned text bits? The friction between graphical bits and text bits will become more apparent in industry in the next year or two.
I'll just mention a couple of other excellent projects. First, I saw a punching bag with sensors inside; speakers above the bag would groan, or cry out, or taunt the human, depending on how hard the person hit the bag. One of the student creators explained that the bag represented the frustration she felt from using her PC. So instead of "throwing the monitor out the window," she could just punch the bag. And how ironic; the bits in the bag (sensors, sound software) enabled an atom-based experience (the punch) that helped work out frustration about (PC-based) bits. Bits to atoms to bits.
Moreover, the punching bag's bits were acting solely in a support role. They weren't connecting with other bits, and other devices, as part of some global sentient Internet-brain, as the hypesters tell us the Net will become. They weren't even visible (i.e. there was no screen). Rather, the bits were limited to the bag itself and were there simply to enhance the atomic user experience. I think this will be the shape of many bit devices in the future: not linked to the Net, but with bits used in a single context, just to support the atoms in the device.
Finally, one wireless application was really striking. People could control parts of an on-screen multimedia display by dialing their cell phones into one of four phone numbers dedicated to the project. I dialed the number that allowed me to play different sound samples. Once dialed in, dialing 1 through 9 on my cell phone would play (loud) any of nine separate samples. With four people controlling their parts, it was quite an orchestra. This was genius because it provided a new experience from the technology we already had in our pocket. It required no new devices, no plug-in downloads, no WAP, no interface to learn.
Thus, the new frontier of wireless: not traditional hardware or software interface design, but rather the experience that people have using it, and participating in it together. I think the students want to introduce the wireless application in movie theaters, so that people have something to play with before the movie starts. I'd play.
More info about the show is on the ITP website.
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