ubik2.comubiquity in time and space

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We currently working on the GPS Museum Website, a web portal with a selection of great locative media artworks and productions. You can navigate the links through a interactive map made with the speakingimage map tool. This website is the continuation of the GPS Museum Facebook page

visit the website

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Trash Alert!, a Transnational Temps art project for your mobile

Trash Alert! will be a opensource Android App dedicated to the geolocation of micro garbage dumps all around you. Please support the project on Goteo the Spanish opensource crowdfunding website.

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A Walk Through Time, a “Walking” iphone app.

I am currently working on a mobile phone app project with Geoff Ainscow from Los Angeles. We study now a iphone app where each of your steps is one million years during a one mile walk tracing the 4,600 million year the evolution of life on earth. In 1997, at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, the Walk Through Time exhibit was created for the opening experience of a five day meeting involving 350 scientist from around the world. Every foot of the one mile walk represents one million years of the evolution of life on Earth. 95 color, illustrative panels, describing the state of life at that time were spaced at various intervals. Starting 4,600 million years ago, at the beginning of the solar system, you walk a mile before reaching the present day and realize that the last 1/10 of an inch represents the 10,000 years of our civilization. This exhibit has been shown in many cities and continues to travel around the world. A book was published in 1998.  Today, the Walk moves into the high tech age with the development of this iPhone app.

walkthroughtime.org

As creative designer, the most important idea around the app is that you will have to walk for real to experience the 4,600 Millons years of evolution of life on earth. Each of your steps will be detected by the accelerometer and will move you forward 1 million years. We hope to  start the programming of the iphone app around October 2011.

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Kezako, a intuitive didactic tool to create and share knowledge

Inspired by the representation of the zodiacs, we created a interactive didactic tool called “Kezako”. This strange word is a french expression asking ” what is this ?”. Well, have a look at Piscis below, each white node is a audio comment and the links between nodes is the route. Just follow the routes, zoom in and out automatically or manually, and learn.

Our aim is to create a very simple interactive animation for people to learn about everyting we can explain with a high resolution picture and a voice. The idea is simple, we can create various audio nodes on a zoomable graphic and link each nodes between them to make a audio route. People just load the high resolution graphic and stream the audio nodes and navigate inside the picture.  If you get the editor, you can build your own Kezako audio routes on your pictures, just need a hig resolution graphic and a way to record your voice on the computer. 

In this picture upstairs, a Kezako user created a audio-guide to explain the Propulsion, the vital organs and the nutrition of a Fish. But if you want to explain the Velazquez painting ” Las Meninas”, go ahead.

Kezako applied to the Meninas from Velázquez

Kezako is better than editing a time consuming movie because our system is: really fast to build, lighter to send online, interactive with nodes and editable by the users in a very simple way. It can be a great tool for teachers, museums and educators, for everybody who wants to explain in a intuitive way.

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Smartphone Audio Guide for museums

A novative simple audio guide explained in this audio comment

This Smartphone Audio Guide proposal for museums consist in a software designed to build easily audio guides, managing a set of bricks containing a audio and a picture related to a masterpiece.

More than a brick, the module is a segment of a wall and let users represent their exhibition space with each segment, moving them with the finger in the screen and building a architecture. This simple software let users build virtually the real space of the exhibition.

Finally, the visitors can use the application created by the museum and get information for the masterpiece they want. Rolling over each segment, we can see a fast preview of the painting, picture or whatever we want. Clicking on on it, a audio player appear on the screen and let the visitors listen to the audio guide.

A simple hyper-navigation mode, let the visitor have a preview of all the master pieces at the same time.

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Sit-in Rings on Google Earth ?

Thanks to the collaboration with google company dpt. in Madrid, we will launch a new digital dream in 2011. Based on the “sit-in” spirit from the 70th, you will be able to create some sit-in rings on Google Earth. We are the children of May 68. Lets occupy the digital maps on earth and make some “sit-in” in the strategic places where we should focus our attention.

This screenshot of f the prototype is showing the first sit-in ring we made in Spain in the Google Laboratories, focusing on the contamination of the mouth of the Mississippi river. We invited five experts in marine biodiversity
to participate to the sit-in ring. A earthworm memory base has been sowed at the relative geodesic coordinates.

Well, this is still a fiction ;-) !

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Galaxia Triunfo, a Universe simulator for the mass culture ?

In 2003, we wrote a proposal for a TV show called “Operación Triunfo”, a international TV concept, a singers academy where people can vote for their favorite new talent. I was very interested by the fact that we call a famous singer a “star” and wrote a creative idea, a concept of web community of users voting for their stars in a online 3D universe. But in this case, the singers were not stars but galaxies and each people voting for them, are a star in their favorite singer galaxy.

Users can vote in real time during the show and create a density of stars. All this looks a little bit “commercial” but the most interesting aspect of the project was to build a multi-realities online software based on a true universe simulator. People can connect to the web community and use their created star as a avatar and chat with others stars from the same galaxy, or move to another galaxy whenever they want. The trick is that if the users want to stop chatting they can use the online software as a classical 3D universe simulator and learn about the last theories. Through a simple TV show we virtually propel a high number of people in the online Universe simulator. A interesting idea was to create some crossing between the trajectories of different galaxies  and let people know the user profile of each others crossing their orbit, and break the duality between galaxies. 

The concept of multi-realities software is based on the use of a metaphor to build a navigable interface. Using a metaphor let us build a model based on a knowledge from physics, biology, cosmology…etc and use this as a digital architecture for whatever we want. Do you think we could connect the masses to the knowledge about the Universe ?,perhaps this type of softwares could help to do it ;-) !!