ubik2.comubiquity in time and space

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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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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 ;-) !!

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Earthworm chatroom network

A hole is simply a frontiere, a transition between one thing and another. Each days, millions of holes open space-time travels, bridges to new dimensions in which we can experiment our existence in new ways. From all the posibilities the hole offers to us like phenomenon, we only accept to pass the frontieres without efforts, the ones we can cross without hanging and mostly without jumping in a intelectual meaning.

we are part of a spiritual acrobats generation ready to project ourselves in every void with the intention to explore it, occupy it and looking for everything from it. We believe the hole is the salvation, it is the door from which we want to continue in this world speaking with others in a new manner. We locate ourselves with the feets on the bord of whatever of it’s faces and our thinkings are the act to jump. Earthworm is a way for chatters to creates virtual holes between spaces and time in various dimensions, flowing between the hole of a needle and the hole of a tunnel generating new ways in space and time, new contextual places to let and share information.

Earthworm project is a contextual multiusers chat network based on the posibility to select or submit a picture with a hole to create a context in a chatroom. It is a single chat window where various users can discuss and generate a audio version of their text. Earthworm implements a jpg grafic in the backstage of the chat tool. The idea is that up the hole there is a intercative area where if you clic on it you will load the hypernavigation made of all the active holes or chats network. The target is to propose to people to contextualise their online discussion targeting a subject through the use of specific pictures and then invite to share and exchange informations about specific environments. It is a poetic aproach of the dimension of digital network making links between various dimensions and places generating virtualy connections between remote places on earth. When users clic on the hole the arrive to the hypernavigation network.It is a map composed by all the active chatrooms using the earthworm interface. Users can select another chat place and jump. Users can act like earthworms generating new shared contexts uploading or using the database collection. Each pictures uploaded are recorded and for free use by other users.The condition to upload is to respect a strucutre of the picture uploaded with a specific size and resolutionand the presence of a hole in the center of the picture. Our interface will distribute automaticaly up the picture. In case it doesn’t look good users will have the posibility to erase and upload their pictures as much as they want.

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My network in my fingerprint

i heard a really interesting conference from Michel Serre about the relation between “identity” and “appurtenance” (“appartenance” in french) and he express the great idea to convert the common fingerprint in a digital map of appurtenance. I could use my fingerprint to zoom inside and insert my facebook nodes and other networks like linkedin, and extend to other parameters as the books i a reading all along my life in a specific microscopic furrow. Based to this proposal, we could create a user interface for people to scan, vectorize and program their fingerprints as a unique digital interactive map they could carry with them. It would be like renovating the fingerprint of our old national identity card and give them a new sense.

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Fincaloader

La propuesta consiste en proporcionar un sistema informático online de visibilidad e intercambio de información para gestores de edificios. El aspecto novedoso de la aplicación es la facilidad del diálogo y la estructuración del mismo a través de una representación de la fachada de cada edificio (fotomontaje o dibujo vectorial). Cada piso actúa como un espacio de edición de información bidireccional -buzón- (gestoría-propietario). Gracias a un sistema interactivo sencillo, cada propietario y su gestoría pueden editar en forma de bocadillo sobre la fachada virtual, una nota accesible a la comunidad de vecinos. Este sistema proporciona para ambas partes una visibilidad permanente.

Cada información en la fachada está representada por un tipo de icono concreto. Pasar encima del icono permite revelar un resumen de la información. Clicar en el icono abre el contenido relacionado debajo de la fachada. En esta parte, dispondremos una serie de paneles “widgets” según las necesidades. Por ejemplo, se puede añadir una serie de paneles extra que cubren un aspecto especifico de la comunidad como por ejemplo, el calendario anual y la gestión de la piscina o de los ascensores. En esta parte se puede desplegar tanto la información añadida en la fachada como la información en los alrededores de la fachada que no se puede mostrar aquí.

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MINOS, knowledge strings for your mobile and your computer.

Minos

Minos

Minos

Minos

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Electro Aimants

Electro-Aimants is a software showing the flux of e.mail exchange between one user and his network. Based on the metaphore of magnets and their magnetic fields, more intense is a comunication with a user, closer is the contact from the user magnet. This visualization let people see how closed they are from their contacts.

Electro-Aimants is organizing your contacts through the groups created in the agenda, a interesting tool let you create a string of contacts and create a mailing list graphically. If you are sharing information with another user, you can login to the magnet with another ID and discover your friend’s network.

A “Stats” screen let you see your relation with your network in a single view.

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Digital Marine Lab for a New Media Art Center

In 2006, we elaborated a proposal for the art center “La Laboral Centro de Arte” and proposed to design a Digital Marine Lab. We occupy the empty space of the oceans in googlemaps to build our digital laboratory. This art center is just in front of the atlantic sea and was perfect for this proposal. The ocean map is divided by a interactive grid ready to receive the digital art projects.

Each project is a underwater tower, visitors can dive in this modules of stratified informations. In the surface area, just a a preview of the project, but if you dive deeper, you will find a more complex information from the project you dive in.

Another aspect of the project was to change aspect of this lab depending from the real state of the atlantic sea, we cached the data in real time from a marine buoy and changed dynamically the visual aspect of this lab. We extended the concept of the dynamic change of the design by the real data from the ocean to the hole site of the Laboral Centro de Arte. Unfortunately we didn’t have the opportunity to finish this work, due to a misunderstanding of the project. Hope one day a art center near the sea can be interested by this proposal making a bridge between other countries and continents. Yes, the Art Center’s projects can draw a line on the sea and cross the atlantic.

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What is “Cloud Thinking” ?

Generally, all the posts uploaded by people on their blogs are dead in the past just after pressing “publish” because they don’t really think about the coordinates of their thoughts and don’t situate them adequately. Our words die in the coordinates of the false present. We should define better the coordinates of our thoughts. I propose to practice now the “Cloud Thinking” in various spaces and times, situating our words in a deepest way. The thought is based on two inner coordinates that are “the place I’m thinking when i formulate the thought” (looking for the moon from the small fishing harbor) and the time i am thinking for this thought (11.09.1979). The 2 coordinates are the coordinates of my thoughts on the web. Why not searching in a web engine for posts from 1979 and create storms of thoughts in space and time ? I hope you will build too your own clouds and meet you tomorrow in another place and time perhaps in 2054 in Kyoto, but this is another story…

The tools to create some new “Cloud Thinking” nodes.

The best tool to create a new “Cloud Thinking” node is the mobile phone. Yes, the mobile phones give us the GPS coordinates and give us the power to be connected online and in the street at the same time. But these coordinates are the basic ones, the coordinates of the machines. But our real coordinates are really more subtle. As human being we can travel through space and time, locating our “being” in another centuries and places. Looking for the moon tonight, i can be with Galileo in 1602.

A web engine for the “Cloud Thinking” nodes.

This web engine is a serie of concentric spheres, like a onion skin all around the planet earth. Each level of this skin is a date. Each days, a new skin is growing from the surface of earth to the exosphere, pushing the other skins in the cosmos. We can travel through the nodes crossing the layers and coordinates. Well, this looks like a digital 3D Encyclopedia of the Humanity, a sort of Wikipedia of history and geography. It is true, the knowledge nodes are there, millions of capsules of information, forming the basic grid of the digital structure of the engine. This engine is Geocentric, that’s the starting point to the discover of the digital cosmos.