I’ve been watching Skyfire quite closely over the last few months. Since purchasing my current phone (MDA compact 4/HTC Diamond) I have been looking for an alternative browser to the pre installed Opera 9. ALthough this is a great browser and works really well with the touch interface, it does not support flash/Ajax elements yet (as it is in beta).
Enter Skyfire…”a free, downloadable mobile web browser that allows you to experience the internet on your phone exactly like on your PC. Now, you can use the full web from your mobile phone with unprecedented speed and simplicity”. When I initially installed skyfire, there was only support for US and canada customers. It also didn’t support my device and so didnt work at all. Today I receieved an email from Skyfire to say that UK support was now available and the most recent version of the beta also suported my device…WHOO!
Initial impressions are mixed however…it does support all the flash/ajax stuff and youtube/iplayer etc. work quite well but the user interface is nowhere near as polished as operas. It is still in beta however so I’m going to watch this space.

“Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.”

“The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’. Yes, that’s it.”

I was looking at google mars last night. Its a new service from google that maps the surface of Mars in a google earth/maps stylee. They show it with 3 different views elevation, visible and infrared. It is the elevation view that I am most interested in as it uses a contour map of the surafce. This got me thinking about my space project. It would tie in nicely with the greenfield and brownfield theory and would provide some nice visulaisations of the space. Using the colours in the map I culd map the ’stains’ people leave on the space even developing it furtur showing the marks that people have left over a century giving some really rich maps of the space.

On monday the 3rd Dec 07 Adam, Luke, Simon and I went along to the mscapeFest at the Hewlett Packard research labs in Bristol. Mscape is a beta software package that allows you to put hotspots over certain areas of real space using GPS and a windows mobile based device. This hotspot can then be assigned to trigger an event on the mobile device, be it a sound, image, video etc. They are also currently in the process of including other sensory devices such as RFID, active RF, infrared and barcode recognition for proximity sensing with many others on the cards. The two day event (we only went for the first day) consisted of various workshops outlining the various aspects of Mscape such as pervasive gaming, community building etc along with networking sessions and tonnes of free food! We managed to get some people interested in what we are doing for the games module which is always a bonus. We also got to have a play with some mediascapes (in a ‘here’s one we made earlier’ blue peter stylee) out in Queens Square in Bristol…it was freezing and we managed to find loads of animal noises (it was a mediascape about animals!) but was good to have a go! All in all it proved to be a very interesting day and certainly sparked off some ideas. It has helped me with my ideas for the space module and can also reinforce some key issues with the games module…well worth the trip out!

Its finished! at last after 3 intensive days working solely in processing we have finished the workshop. It all ended with a presentation of the pieces using the green screen in the window on portland square. There is some footage of the presentations on its way along with a video documenting the 3 days but for now Adam took some photos for me and can be viewed here. Below is an Image of my final sketch (hopefully I will try to get it live on the web).

So, I’ve been taking part in a 3 day processing workshop in order to improve my programming skills. As part of the workshop we have to produce visualisations for data streams from iDAT’s archOS system. I’ve been working on a simple 3D visualisation of the temperature readings from the sensors of Portland Square where a cube grows and shrinks according to the outside temperature over a 24 hour period. I also incorporated a visualisation of the time of day that the individual data was taken in the form of a light source that mimics the sun’s path through the sky. I am still working on this and hope to include some colour changing aspects to make it look nicer! At the end of the second day we got to test our visualisation on the Green Screen in the atria of Portland Square ( a huge LED mesh screen) and they all looked really good. I have some images of mine below.

Lets face it…I’m not the best programmer in the world and with doing a degree in digital art and technology it can leave me a bit behind the rest of the year (playing a small violin). Ex-MLA/DAT graduate Ruari Glynn is going to run a processing workshop this week to which I am signed up to. Apparently processing is a programming environment and language based on java which has been developed for artists, designers and non programmers to help them learn how to program using object oriented methods. Although I can program to some extent using java and actionscript, I think this will help me broaden my horizons to the world of progamming.

Simon is on a mission, His helvetica hunt has led him to some interesting if not questionable conclusions about the capital R within the typeface (go see his blog for the explanation)

Here is my gift to you Simon…a calibri giant R:

Ok so last night saw the first of this years Apollo seminars hosted by iDAT. Presenting was Gianni Corino, an Italian digital artist and all round digital explorer who is currently working alongside and teaching at iDAT. Below are some notes taken from the evening including a list of his past projects. I have to confess that these notes are blatantly stolen off Adam as he has a PDA with a keypad where as I have a silly little stylus touch screen jobby and cant keep up with the typing! Thanks adam!

Cultural and social interface for public and open spaces

Social Processes
Creativity
Knowledge
Consciousness
Technologies

Media art

Locative and mobile
Mixed reality
Net art
Digital storytelling
Crossmedia
Concepts of network and mixed space undermine my production and research

Dissertation on locative media and quixote as project

Social networks and locative media.

Trame
Project concerning technologies and online for cultural memory of 21st century. A multiarchive web system based on open source video technologies for multimedia online archives.
Trame.polito.it/trame

Remote risonanze
Telematic audio installation. A bridge between the inside and the outside, the online and the offline. Voices from the virtual world come back to the real world to their visitors.

Quixote
A collective project that is made as a moblog and locative media, a diary in real time of quixnote adventures made of images and text to create and send through performance participants phones. Puppet tracked through a gps signal. Suprised how the artefact can create an emotional reception to people.

Dn[T]3
An interactive installation for public spaces. A semantic ecosystem a memetic ecology, where the tag is equal to meme as a semantic unit according to Darwinian theory and lasting all of the installations time. It analyses words sent via SMS with an inferential engine and tracks each word received as absolute frequency, relations frequences. The project applies folksonomis model a typical internet digital world to real world. We can assume semantic clustures thru doing this.
Met.amor.ph

Metrobosco
An installation which has profound social and ecological value. A sort of game to be played by people, creating places of discussion and reflexion around urban replanning and its deeper meanings.

Practice based research in the context of interaction design and social adventure.

We got to play with one of iDAT’s Aibo dogs in the games module the other day. Seem pretty cool if not rather expensive. Also Sony shut down their robotics division in 2006 so they don’t sell them any more…or offer any support! Nice one Sony!

Aibo wikipedia depinition below:
“AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt, homonymous with “partner” in Japanese) is one of several types of robotic pets designed and manufactured by Sony; there have been several different models since their introduction in 1999. Able to walk, “see” its environment via camera, and recognize spoken commands, they are considered to be autonomous robots, since they are able to learn and mature based on external stimuli from their owner or environment, or from other AIBOs.”

The aibo is basically an artificially intelligent robotic dog with loads of cool things bunged in…like wifi connections, cameras, voice and face recognition, sensors and the whole thing is programmable to pretty much whatever you want it too. There are loads of downloadable personalities for it…some quite questionable…but on the whole its quite a cool bit of kit!

I took some videos of it doing random stuff…we couldn’t work out what personality it had loaded at the time.