"Urban Screens are dynamic digital displays and visual interfaces located within urban public spaces. They include LED screens and signs, plasma screens, information terminals and projection surfaces as well as intelligent architectural surfaces and media facades...Urban Screens transform the capacity of public spaces to serve as a platform for user-generated civic and cultural expression, community building, multiculturalism and public engagment in issues related to social, cultural and environmental sustainability....Through networking, content sharing and joint broadcasting, they constitute a rapidly expanding and still largely experimental global multimedia infrastructure for commercial and cultural exchange.""The IUSA aims to inform and support the ‘worldwide Urban Screens movement’: the expanding use of dynamic digital displays in public spaces; their considerate and sustainable integration in the urban landscape; and the ability for screen communities to collaborate in the digital space to share content, experience, ideas, innovations and emerging possibilities." Book:Media Facades: History, Technology and Content, M.Hank Haeusler
I followed a link from an article written by Andy Oram, of the O'Reilly Radar and found some interesting information related to public media. The graphics and quotes below are from a publication, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics (pdf), written by people from the Center for Social Media at the School of Communication, American University.
Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University
"Multi-platform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature of truly democratic public life from here on in. And it’ll be media both for and by the public. The grassroots mobilization around the 2008 electoral campaign is just one signal of how digital tools for making and sharing media open up new opportunities for civic engagement. But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident, or for free. The same bottom-line logic that runs media today will run tomorrow’s media as well. If we’re going to have media for vibrant democratic culture, we have to plan for it, try it out, show people that it matters, and build new constituencies to invest in it. The first and crucial step is to embrace the participatory—the feature that has also beenmost disruptive of current media models. We also need standards and metrics to definetruly meaningful participation in media for public life. And we need policies, initiatives,and sustainable financial models that can turn today’s assets and experiments intotomorrow’s tried-and-true public media. Public media stakeholders, especially such trusted institutions as public broadcasting,need to take leadership in creating a true public investment in public media 2.0." Action Agendas "Public media institutions and makers need to develop a participatory nationalnetwork and platform; to cross cultural, social, economic, ethnic, and politicaldivides; to collaborate; and to learn from others’ examples, including their mistakes. • Policymakers need to create structures and funding to support national coordinationof public media networks and funding for production, curation, and archiving; touse universal design principles in communications infrastructure policy and universalservice values in constructing and supporting infrastructure; to support lifelongeducation that helps everyone be media makers; and to build grassroots participationinto public policy processes using social media tools. • Funders can invest in media projects that build democratic publics; in norms setting,standardization of reliability tools, and impact metrics; and in experimentsin media making, media organizations, and media tools, especially amongdisenfranchised communities." Some key points from the article: Five fundamental ways that people's media habits are changing - The Five Media Habits: Choice Conversation Curation Creation Collaboration Trends with possibilities for public media 2.0: Ubiquitous video (choice, creation, collaboration) Powerful databases (curation, creation) Social networks as public forums (conversation, collaboration) Locative media (choice, creation) Distributed distribution (choice, curation) Hackable platforms (creation, collaboration, curation) Accessible metrics (creation, curation) Cloud content (choice, creation) Pervasive gaming (choice, collaboration)
Harald Kosch and Christian Timmerer, December 2009
"Effective multimedia management must span the metadata life cycle—from its creation through processing, storage, distribution, and deployment—and work whether the metadata is tightly connected with or independent of the media it describes.
Finally, we need better integration of situational context. This includes not only domain knowledge, but also legal and cultural issues, metadata and semantic quality, compression and encryption techniques."
ITV, the U.K. Independent Television Network, is inviting viewers to participate in a virtual Christmas choir. If you want to participate download the headphone track, and sing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". When you are ready, get out turn on your videocam, keep your headphones in, and sing along to the track. When you have finished, you'll upload the video to YouTube.
If you can follow the headphone track and sing the carol in tune, you might just have a chance to be seen as part of a montage of videos, either singing the carol in all at once with your virtual choir-mates, or as part of one carol sung by many people, one at a time.
I'd like to share with you a link to a great post covering the recent Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces conference in Banff, Canada. The post was written by Martin Kaltenbrunner, author of the Tangible Interaction Frameworks blog, and is packed with info and interesting links:
Martin was impressed by the iLabat the University of Calgary. He also mentioned the work of researchers from the Media Computing Groupat RWTH Aachen University known for SLAP, and the Media Interaction Lab at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, known for CRISTAL.
Info about Martin from his website:
"Martin Kaltenbrunner, co-founder of Reactable Systems, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. His research concentrates on tangible user interfaces and human computer interaction in general, topics he has been also teaching at the Kunstuniversität Linz, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and UCP Porto. Recently he has been mainly working on the human computer interaction concepts of the Reactable - an electronic musical instrument with a tangible user interface. He is author of the open source tangible interaction framework reacTIVision and the related TUIO protocol, which has been widely adopted for open source multi-touch applications."
For an overview of what Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces is about, take a careful look of the video from the 2008 conference, credits listed below:
Video Credits (in order of appearance, Tabletop 2008):
1. System Design for the WeSpace: Linking Personal Devices to a Table-Centered Multi-User, Multi-Surface Environment. Jiang, H., Wigdor, D., Forlines, C., Shen, C.
2. Group Coordination and Negotiation through Spatial Proximity Regions around Mobile Devices on Augmented Tabletops, Kray C., Rohs, M., Hook, J. Kratz, S.
3. Tabletop AgilePlanner: A Tabletop-Based Project Planning Tool for Agile Software Development Teams
Wang, X., Maurer, F.
4. TableTrays: Temporary, Reconfigurable Work Surfaces for Tabletop Groupware. Pinelle, D., Stach, T., Gutwin, C.
5. IntuPaint: Bridging the Gap Between Physical and Digital Painting. Vandoren, P., Laerhoven, T., Claesen, L., Taelman, J., Raymaekers, C., Reeth, F.
6. Experiences with Building a Thin Form-Factor Touch and Tangible Tabletop. Izadi, S., Butler, A., Hodges, S., West, D., Hall, M., Buxton, B., Molloy, M.
7. ShapeTouch: Leveraging Contact Shape on Interactive Surfaces, Cao, X., Wilson, A., Balakrishnan, R., Hinckley, K., Hudson, S.
8. PocketTable: Mobile Devices as Multi-Touch Controllers for Tabletop Application Development, Hafeneger, S., Weiss, M., Herkenrath, G., Borchers, J.
9. Presenting using Two-Handed Interaction in Open Space, Vlaming, L., Smit, J., Isenberg, T.
10. DepthTouch: Using Depth-Sensing Camera to Enable Freehand Interactions on and Above the Interactive Surface Benko, H., and Wilson, A.
11. Pokey: Interaction Through Covert Structured Light. Wren, C., Ivanov, Y., Beardsley, P., Kaneva, B., Tanaka, S.
12. Creating Malleable Interactive Surfaces using Liquid Displacement Sensing. Hilliges, O. Kim, D., Izadi, S.
13. Collaborative Interaction and Integrated Spatial Information and Services in Disaster Management, Fruijtiera, S., Dulkb, P., Diasc, E.
