Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Augmented reality flying

This neat BBC report shows augmented reality added to aircraft.  Actual, material plane pilots get virtual obstacles mapped onto their cockpits.  In turn, their flight info transmits into the play screens of gamers at laptops.

(thanks to Ed Webb!)

Ghost bikes for the dead

Ghost Bikes is a memorial project, installing a white bicycle at the spot where a bicyclist was killed by a car.

Analog locative art: imagine this as augmented reality.

(via MetaFilter)

Installing art in Yorkshire: stone-based locative art

Call it locative chaotic art: a series of sculptures appears in Yorkshire.  The stone heads have faces, and also symbols, with perhaps some letters.  It's the work of this sculptor, and feels like an ARG-ish mix of marketing stunt plus distributed art.

What makes it more fun is this coda to that BBC story:

George Griffiths, an artist from Arthington who was among those to receive the heads, said he had tried to contact Johnson through the website.

But he received an email in return to say the artist was out of the country for a few weeks, does not have a phone, does not use the Internet and does not have access to television.

Hmmmm!

(via ARG_discuss)

Waking City taking registrations

Waking City, a Toronto-based augmented reality/urban game, will launch next month (starting September 16).  It's taking player registrations now, for this week.  Watercooler Clickable Culture has more logistical info.

Gaming against gaming

Today's fear of the digital comes from the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC), running an ad campaign blaming obesity on computer games.  Here's a nice screenshot.  For the CDC to mount such an effort ties together a few scary memes nicely: sloth, disease, contagion, corrupted sports.

The thing is additionally entertaining when one sees how the CDC itself uses computer games on this very topic.  For example, their VERB campaign encourages users to log in and create a characters.  And their Yellowball game, which looks like fun, is an interesting augmented reality game, like YellowArrow.  Yellowball also, unsurprisingly, encourages you to blog the balls.

There's something easy to be said about hypocrisy, of course (and the likely defense is that the campaign calls for balance, not absintence).  But what's more interesting is just how prevalent gaming and social software have become, so much so that they get incorportated into campaigns to limit their usage.

(via Water Cooler Games)

One Treasure's Trove located

An update on the Treasure's Trove game: one of the hidden relics has been spotted.  A parent and child managed to coax a park's name out of the text, apparently, along with an image of a specific tree.

(via LISNews)

Augmented cities: Yellow Arrow

YellowArrow has a video of samples.  This project connects the placement of big yellow arrows, which point at something, to a Web site, which can describe what they're pointing at.

(via MajorFun)

Augmented reality and a hint of Bradbury

Savannah is an early educational augmented reality project:

Savannah is a strategy-based adventure game where a virtual space is mapped directly onto a real space. Children ‘play’ at being lions in a savannah, navigating the augmented environments with a mobile handheld device.

A shiver of literary recognition: does any remember Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" (1951)?

(via Smartmobs)

The world in There

There and the Pentagon are considering a virtual reality simulation of the world. The Semantic Earth meets Baudrillard's Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map -

the cartographers of an imaginary Empire "draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering exactly covering the territory" so that the real territory underneath the map is obscured. The people of this Empire come to relate more closely to this map than they do to the original territory underneath (they live, work, and play on it, etc.) When, eventually, the map becomes tattered and frayed, and ultimately disintegrates, the people become nostalgic for it, feeling that they have lost something. The real territory which is now revealed to them seems alien, unfamiliar.

I anticipate an augmented reality iteration.

generation RFID

Howard Rheingold asks us to "[i]magine the worldview of the generation born into a computation-pervaded world".
Thinking for a minute about how kids have accultured computers: how about a kids' computing lanuage for RFID tags, like Logo?
When will we see adults routinely surprised by tricks kids play with tags, like passing notes by them, or rewriting "grownup" RFID?
Watch for the first words of a new discourse around RFID, generationally based. It should include "mom, dad, I bet were you were growing up, you couldn't mark up anything!"