Today we had a workshop in Roland Levinsky with a group of Architecture students, looking at ‘Inhabiting the Inbetween’ which is looking at the material and more importantly the ‘immaterial’ of an area or space. We were given a brief and it should be an interesting project crossing the thinking patterns of Dat and Architecture students.
The aim of this project is to see how we interact and use the space in an area or building and think about how digital objects can inhabit and embed in the empty or immaterial space. It is the link between the digital space/information and the physical.
We are now living in a world where the digital fabric is overlaying a physical environment with things like Wifi, Bluetooth, Augmented Reality and QR codes. I am interested in the area of Augmented Reality on which I did a project last year. My project was at Plymouth Hoe and involved using the Iphone to scan the environment and overlay historic photos on the modern buildings in real time and provide historical infomration about them.
We are going to be doing a project with the Architect students using technology to change the way we use the space in the area of Devonport, that brings together the community in some way and bridges the gap between digital immaterial and the physical material.
However, that’s getting ahead of ourselves, todays session was all about getting to grips with a few technologies we could potentially use in Devonport.
We looked at the following technologies:
Stickybits is a QR Code scanning service, where you can print and scan QR codes to reveal more information about it
Layar – A really cool Augmented Reality platform.
Tales of Things – Which is basically a service that allows you to link any type of media with an object by printing out QR codes and sticking it to the object – a simple but very cool idea!
Our task today was to use Stickybits to play a modified version of Hide and Seek.
We split into groups and were asked to draw some monsters on paper, photograph them and upload them to the Stickybits service. Using Stickybits we would then print out its unique QR code and hide them anywhere within the University Campus for our teammates to find.
We gave our teammates clues to the QR codes whereabouts. Once they had found the QR code – they had to scan it with a Smartphone or Ipad to reveal the Monster and our hidden message!
This was a great excercise and showed us what possibilities there were in ways of using this technology. With simply a large space and the QR codes we were able to turn the University Campus into a Playground – interacting and looking at the space in a totally different way. This is what we want to achieve with our project.
