Arrived last night in unsunny London, where I've come to watch the first public trials of Urban Tapestries, a location-based public authoring system that allows people to wander around a neighborhood (Bloomsbury in this case) with wirelessly networked handheld computers (here, iPAQs) and 'write their city' by leaving notes about specific locations. These notes can be labels ("This is the British Museum"), pointers ("The British Museum houses the famous Rosetta Stone."), personal reminisces ("I met my first boyfriend here, in the room with the Rosetta Stone."), random observations in badly written couplets ("The urge to translate still prevails/ Despite the losses it entails"), or anything at all people wish to write. Unlike writings in a journal you keep for yourself, these notes can be read by any other UT user who passes through the place you're writing about. Theoretically you can leave pictures and sounds as well as words, but those features aren't quite working yet.
I don't usually up and cross the ocean to look at other people's early demos, but this trip is kind of a pilgrimage for me. UT is one of those projects that people who know me and my work inevitably tell me about when they learn of it themselves: "Oh, you have to check out Urban Tapestries, it's just like Annotate Space!" Um, yeah, just like AS, except that UT has a talented project team, a budget and corporate backing, and now people can actually try it out. It's that last thing that made me want to come see it. With AS I designed a system that I hoped would encourage people to write their responses to their environment while they were there, but I never got to find out whether they actually would do so, and why they would do it and what kinds of notes they would create. That's what the UT team is learning now.
So today I hung out at UT HQ, chatted with members of the project team and watched as they explained the project to their guinea pigs. "Urban Tapestries is basically a social framework for the understanding the impacts of wireless technology in the urban environment," explained John. This is not a way one can open a mobile media demo in the U.S., at least if one hopes to keep the audience from moving on to another booth. Here, though, people seemed quite interested in using high-end consumer tech to advance a "social framework," and clearly considered it a Good Thing. After hearing the project's history and seeing its analog version, the testers sat down with the PDAs and got shown how to use the UT software application to create a "pocket" (a note referring to a specific place on the map) and a "thread" (a series of pockets organized on a theme).
The software is designed to do something quite simple: identify a geographical place, associate an arbitrary bit of text and an author with that place, and if anyone else comes by, let them read that bit of text. But the systems needed to implement this are technical beasts. UT does not use GPS, because GPS works poorly in built-up cities. Instead, users indicate their location by pointing to it on a digital map on the PDA screen. Then the PDA tells the server what spot on the map the user pointed to, and the server kind of reconciles that with its own GIS system, records where the user thinks she is, and if the user then writes something, the server can record the place where it was written and add it to the database. Each time the user points to a new spot on the map, the server retrieves all the notes that have already been written in that general area and identifies them with icons on the map, so the user can click on them and read them. On a little handheld computer, running Flash and communicating with a server through a newly launched custom-built wireless mesh network, this process happens VERY slowly, as in really so frustratingly slowly that you almost cannot blame the computer when it sputters, gives up and crashes, which at this point it does quite often. Apparently, the more information gets added to the system, the slower it gets.
The testers gave UT a go and saw how wonky it could be, but they persisted, taking the PDAs out into the streets to create their own threads based on their experiences of Bloomsbury--often stuff like "Pubs I Like Around Here" and "Where I've Been Today." Every person I saw was galled by the technology and yet thrilled by the idea of what it enabled them to do. Here, you can read their impressions yourself. Now, "good idea, bad technology" is a comment I hear (and offer) about new media projects all the time, but in this case, the testers just seem so wistful about it, like they really want this to be made workable someday, and soon! Location-based media geek though I am, I didn't understand why they felt so strongly until I got a chance to play with the software myself.
On the PDA screen, I dragged my pointer to a spot on the little map, and wrote a short note about the park in that place--nothing of substance, just a facile comment like the ones in my moblog. Then I saw it marked on the map, moved to a new spot, left another note and watched as the two points got connected by a line. (I'm leaving out the parts where the computer crashed, which it did repeatedly.) As I tapped at the wonky onscreen keyboard, I remembered being in college and hearing what had happened to a friend of mine who had discovered virtual worlds on the Internet. "We used to see a lot of Gordon. But then came TinyMUD." And I realized that I was doing something I can easily imagine doing obsessively, becoming one of those computer weirdos people talk about. They'll just have to come up with a catchy, derogatory label for my addiction. I can't wait.
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