Why reduce your full body potential to small hand movements once you
start using a computer? The ChairIO is a chair based interface to
control navigation in 3D environments or to control cursor movement on the desktop. To operate the ChairIO, users sit on the device, based on the Swopper© by aeris, and tilt it by shifting their body weight in any direction or rotate the seat. This physical movement of the seat is mapped to viewpoint/direction movement in the 3D environment. This way of controlling navigation has proven to be highly intuitive for navigation, is good for the back, and is a joy to use.

In denCity.net urban places and objects are tagged with QR-codes (~ barcodes), giving them a virtual address. All tags are virtually interlinked by denCity.net. The tags contain the respective location’s ID and GPS coordinates: smoothly combining the virtual with the real, each tag in denCity.net has a physical location.
denCity.net examines the enrichment of real urban sites by a virtual dimension of information and networking. The project explores the territorialization of the virtual and the deterritorialization of the physical, en route to an augmented perception of urban reality and density.

Greyworld explores the potential of small interventions, embedded in the urban fabric of a public space, to allow some form of self-expression in areas of the city that people see everyday, but normally exclude and ignore. Their work strives to establish special intimacies through the unexpected articulation of objects installed in public spaces—to “short circuit” both the environmental and social expectations supplied by the surrounding urban realm. Andrew Shoben is willing to share his passion for a new kind of public art that responds to, and reflects, the diversity of life lived in and around a public space. Public art that places the viewer at
the centre of the creative experience, and offers a glimpse into another magical layer of reality.

Projects and project teams of the Ars Electronica Futurelab from the years 1996 to 2006 are presented here in the shape of a semantic network. The data has been extracted out of the project archive of the laboratory.

Visualized with SemaSpace by Gerhard Dirmoser / Dietmar Offenhuber (AT)


Semaspace is a fast and user-friendly diagram editor for visualizing complex semantic networks. The editor supports the creation of interactive 2-D and 3-D diagrams. The system enables the user to compute the layout of complex network structures in real time and to integrate additional information (e. g. images, sounds, texts) into them.

The Real Time Rome project, shown here, uses aggregated data from cell phones, buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time. By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. In the long run, will it be possible to reduce the inefficiencies of present day
urban systems and open the way to a more sustainable urban future?

Real Time Rome was developed by MIT SENSEable City Lab for the Venice Biennale 2006 with Telecom Italia as principal sponsor.

Director of the SENSEable City Laboratory: Carlo Ratti
Director of the Real-Time-Rome project: Andres Sevtsuk
Visual Software Designer: Burak Arikan
Team: Assaf Biderman, Francesco Calabrese, Filippo Dal Fiore, Saba Ghole, Daniel Guatierrez, Sonya Huang,
Sriram Krishnan, Justin Moe, James Patten, Francisca Rojas, Najeeb Marc Tarazi

This research is part of the "Office of Tomorrow" project, which is funded in part by the Austrian FFG consortium (FHplus framework, no. 811407) and voestalpine Informationstechnologie GmbH.

Shared Design Space is a multi-user design workspace which enables users to simultaneously draw on a large-scale interactive table and present their work on a touch-sensitive presentation wall. The project features high resolution tabletop projection, accurate pen tracking and novel interaction techniques for the table. The setup is based on a pattern, which is tracked by the digital pens. Anoto-based pens are ballpoint-pens with an embedded camera that tracks the movements simultaneously. The pen has to be used on a specially printed paper with a pattern of tiny dots.

Credits:
FH OÖ, Hagenberg Digitale Medien (A)

Peter Brandl, Michael Haller, Daniel Leithinger, Jakob Leitner and Thomas Seifried.

Having wandered for years in an owner-centric Cyberspace, where do we turn for online public spaces? Using a loosely coupled network of distributed proxies, ShiftSpace seeks to provide a new set of collective virtual spaces built above the existing tunnels and stations that make up our hypertextual subway system.We are building an Open Source meta-web and we would enjoy your company.

ShiftSpace is currently developed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program.
ShiftSpace is supported through a grant given by the Swiss Confederation.

The modern city is characterized by aggressive neon signage and in-yer-face billboards that can be seen as a proxy for the commercialization of our society. In response, Graffiti Research Lab has developed an arsenal of technologies like LED throwies, graffiti-writing caption software and mobile urban projectors that allow individuals to stake their own claim to a piece of the cityscape. Affordable DIY components facilitate a form of urban protest that carries on the graffiti tradition using state of the art high tech.

The communications project that the Ars Electronica Futurelab developed in 2005 for the City of Linz’s Hotspot initiative has quickly spawned spin-offs and an interesting enhancement application. Now, there’s also a WikiMap Madrid (produced in cooperation with MediaLabMadrid) and a WikiMap Europe (featuring statistical data and individuals’ opinions about the EU) as well as a WikiMap for regional online community projects in Upper Austria. With the latest development various WikiMaps can be directly implemented in Google Earth.

Development: Ars Electronica Futurelab
Commissioned by the City of Linz (WikiMap Linz), Federal Chancellery of Austria ( WikiMap Europe), Provision: BMBWK, Land Oberösterreich ( WkiMap Upper Austria) Cartographic material and support: Magistrat Linz, Informationstechnologie, Geodaten Management, Stadtkommunikation Linz, MediaLabMadrid, EUROSTAT, Statistik Austria, Land Oberösterreich: DORIS